Centre rolls out plan to remove floating waste

Failing to achieve much so far in cleaning Ganga, one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet projects, the Centre recently rolled out a plan to remove all the floating waste found on its surface.

The project’s reach includes Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal, and five states the river spans.

The BJP-led NDA government completed two years in office on May 26; however, no major step has been taken yet to clean the waters. Proper planning for the task has been the defence of the Union water resource ministry for the delay. Envisaging to rid the river of all floating flowers, coconuts, plastic bottles, plastic bags, food packets, corpses (human and animal), algae, logs, bamboos, wood material, water hyacinth, aquatic flora (plants) and any other floating waste by using specialised machines, the National Mission for Clean Ganga, nodal body to spearhead Namami Gange (Clean Ganga) project, recently floated a tender to invite bids from the interested firms for the work, which is expected to start in the next few months. The plan is to hire contractors who will be responsible to get the machines, whose numbers would depend on the river surface area, and deploy them in rivers to collect all floating matter before disposing them on the shoreline with the help of urban local bodies.

“The responsibility of identifying the number of machines required for a particular stretch would rest with the contractor,” said a senior water ministry official.

The last date for submitting bids is June 13, the officials said, adding, “Once finalised, the work would be carried on for the next three years.”

Importantly, the ministry sources said, that in cases of human corpses found during the process, the contractor would be bound to inform the local police and follow the required procedures. For transparency in the work, the contractor will have to document daily activities. The contractor must also “photograph and videograph pre and post scenarios” the tender document, accessed by this newspaper stated, adding, “All records shall be maintained for collection of waste, disposal of waste at river shore and collection of waste by the local authorities for further disposal.”