A meeting was held between Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation and Union Minister of State for Housing & Urban Affairs along with other concerned officials on 9-7-2018 to review the Solid Waste Management (SWM) projects in 97 Ganga towns in the States of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. It was decided to continue pursuing the respective State Governments for taking up SWM projects as required.

Under Namami Gange programme the development of ghats and crematoria are also being taken up and the progress on the same is reviewed regularly in meeting with concerned stakeholders at the level of Director General, NMCG. A total of 63 projects are sanctioned for River Front Development and development of Ghats and Crematoria at an estimated cost of Rs.1197 Cr. Out of these 24 projects are completed and other projects are at various stages of implementation.

97 towns along river Ganga have been identified for solid waste management. The list of the towns is enclosed at Annexure-I.

Secretary-MoHUA has addressed the Chief Secretaries of all the five Ganga States to submit Action Plan, with timelines for achieving the objectives by December 2018 so that the progress in the matter may be regularly monitored by MoHUA. The focus in the letter was for the states to finalize the detailed Project Reports (DPRs) for Solid Waste Management activities and seek central assistance under SBM-U as per guidelines.

The Status reported by the States is as under:

The Government has taken various other interventions to arrest the solid waste entering into river. These include

a) Deployment of trash skimmers at 11 locations for removal of floating trash from the river.

b) 24X7 ghat cleaning project at Varanasi to regularly clean, collect waste and hand over waste to ULB for its processing & disposal. Similar projects have been approved for 5 more towns namely Haridwar, Bithoor, Kanpur, Allahabad and Mathura-Vrindavan.

c) States have been advised for making adequate arrangements for the drains joining the river, stretching at least 1 km from the river confluence, for trapping the solid waste entry to rivers and its regular cleaning on top priority, such as screens, in the drains. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has been coordinating & monitoring this with the States.

These interventions are taken up in co-ordination with concerned urban local body to ensure that the collected waste is removed and taken for further processing and disposal.

ANNEXURE-I

List of Towns, Along Main Stem of River Ganga, Identified for Solid Waste Management

This information was given by Union Minister of State for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Dr. Satya Pal Singh in a written reply in Lok Sabha today.

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NP/SKP/IA