NEW DELHI: The Comptroller and Auditor General (
CAG) has indicted the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), a nodal central agency to implement the government's flagship 'Namami Gange' programme, for delay in executing the Ganga cleaning projects, non-utilisation of fund meant for river cleaning and lapses in monitoring.
In its report on performance of the 'Namami Gange' (Rejuvenation of
River Ganga) programme, tabled in the Parliament on Tuesday, the CAG also highlighted its findings which show that the river water quality in eight out of 10 cities/towns (except Rishikesh and Haridwar) along Ganga does not meet even the outdoor bathing standards.
The cities towns come under this category include Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna, Munger, Bhagalpur, Gayespur and Budge Budge. The CAG in its comparative study of river water quality found that the Total Coliform (TC) level in all these cities was very high, ranging from six to 334 times higher than the prescribed standards, during 2016-17.
Coliform is a board class of bacteria found in environment, including the faeces of man and other warm-blooded animals. The presence of coliform bacteria in water may indicate a possible presence of disease-causing organisms. Among these eight cities\towns, the TC level was highest (334 times higher than prescribed levels) in Gayespur in
West Bengal.
The CAG had initiated performance audit of the 'Namami Gange' in the wake of the
Uttarakhand High Court's directions for a special audit of all the centrally financed schemes launched to rejuvenate the river Ganga.
The federal auditor mainly audited the activities which took place during 2014-15 to 2016-17 and selected 87 projects (worth over Rs 7,655 crore) for this purpose. Some earlier ongoing projects on Ganga cleaning too were scrutinised by the CAG which, on the request of the Union water resources ministry, also concurrently audited the NMCG.
Considering that the measures taken in the past were inadequate, the present NDA government had launched 'Namami Gange' and allocated an initial sum of Rs 2,037 crore for this in the Union Budget of 2014-15. Later, the Cabinet had approved Rs 20,000 crore for five years (2015-2020) for the programme and even set up Clean Ganga Fund (CGF) with voluntary contributions from general public and NRIs\PIOs.
The CAG in its report noted that a corpus of over Rs 198 crore was available in the CGF as on March 31 this year, but the NMCG could not utilise any amount out of the Fund. It said the entire amount was lying in banks due to non-finalisation of action plan.
Referring to delay in execution of works, the government's auditor noted that the NMCG did not finalise and approve Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) for projects totalling 1,397 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage treatment capacity till August despite the fact that award for the work of all the Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) was to be completed by September, 2016.
Highlighting lapses of different agencies on monitoring front, the CAG said that the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) could deploy only 36 Automatic Water Quality Monitoring Systems as against 113 site identified along the river Ganga for continuous receipt of water quality monitoring on real-time basis.
It also noted that the NMCG did not develop any mechanism to take appropriate remedial action on the information shared by the public on the Bhuvan Ganga App.
The Bhuvan Ganga App was launched by the government as a user-friendly mobile application to enable public to collect and report information on various pollution sources that affects the water quality of river Ganga. The App was developed as a platform for crowd sourcing to monitor pollution in the Ganga and enable decision makers to prioritize interventions.
