Australia has informed India that it will offer technical help and support for the ambitious Clean Ganga campaign. The project is a huge one – It will take around 20 years to be completed. Peter Suckling, Australian High Commissioner, has stated that Australia will collaborate with India. Incidentally, Australia has spent 350 million dollars with the aim of coming up with a river basin modeling technology that could resuscitate the Murray-Darling river basin, which happens to be the biggest of its kind in the Oceanian country. According to Suckling, Australia will now share this technology with India as well.
Pilot project for river Brahmani
A pilot project is, meanwhile, being carried out in River Brahmani, which is located in eastern India, with the aim of perhaps gauging the feasibility of the Australian technology. At the time Narendra Modi was in Australia, the Government of the Southern Hemisphere nation had declared that it will improve its water partnership with India. The Australian High Commissioner has also stated that cleaning up a river system like Ganga is a huge exercise and one feels that Australia’s technical assistance will make things a little smoother for ones entrusted with carrying out the project.
Incidentally, both the countries are facing some issues with their water resources and both accept the fact that these issues need to be addressed at the earliest. They opine that in order to make sure that water resources are evenly distributed and ecosystems are preserved, river systems need to be looked after in an effective way.
Challenges facing Clean Ganga campaign
The Clean Ganga programme, a flagship project of the present Indian Government, is set to face some rather complex issues. One of the major challenges for this project will be to establish some sort of uniformity among the 11 States through which the largest river in the country passes. The present plans are supposed to be redesigned with the aim of achieving results in the shortest possible time. The Government will also be saddled with the Herculean responsibility of ensuring that all the units responsible for the project right from the top till the last are well-coordinated.
Twenty agencies have been given the responsibility of carrying out various tasks related to the project and the Government will have to see to it that all of them are pulling in the same direction. The efforts are supposed to start at the main locations along the course of the river – this will provide a proper indication of how the project shall shape up in the year ahead. The Government will also need to look at the work of the pollution control boards in the different States. These boards are supposed to play major roles in the execution of the project but they are yet to come up with any plan to ensure waste discharge sans harmful pollutants, which is the main issue being faced by the river.
Survey of India to help with Clean Ganga
The Survey of India has decided to pitch in for the Clean Ganga project by creating maps of the river. At the moment, the project is in an advanced stage of proposal and it is expected that the survey will be starting fairly soon. Survey of India authorities have stated that it will take a couple of years to finish the project since the silt will have to be identified and then quantified. It will also pinpoint the location of all the entities that are playing a major role in polluting the river.
Swarna Subba Rao, Surveyor General of India, has stated that the estimated cost of the project is INR 542 crore. Rao said technologies such as air photography and a laser technique named Lidar will be used in order to create a map of the river. As part of air photography technology, aircraft will be used to survey the river.
