The Union Minister for Road Transport & Highways, Shipping and Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation, Nitin Gadkari has emerged as one of the top performing ministers under the incumbent Modi government. He has been done phenomenal work in both infrastructure building in the transport sector and cleaning the Ganga. Now, the minister who has been able to achieve this mind boggling feat in his tenure has set yet another ambitious target for himself. Gadkari now intends to clean the river Yamuna in the short period of just 15 months.
The Union Minister has promised that in 1.3 years, the water in the river Yamuna would become so pure that people will be able to drink it. Gadkari spoke at the foundation laying ceremony of the Namami Gange project in Agra. He also said that the Rajiv Gandhi government had spent Rs. 5,000 crore on cleaning the Yamuna but that there were no results. However, after Modi became the prime minister, the government started projects to clean not only river Ganga but river Yamuna as well.
If one goes by Gadkari’s phenomenal track record, there is no reason to doubt the union minister’s promise that river Yamuna will be cleaned in a period of 15 months. As far as river Ganga is concerned, Gadkari had said on December 6 last year, “By the end of March, 70-80 per cent of the Ganga will be cleaned, and my feeling is that by March 2020, the river will be 100 per cent clean.” He had further said that Rs. 26,000 crore is going to be spent for cleaning the river under the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG). This was not for the first time that the union minister made such a claim. Earlier in 2018, he had said that by March 2019, more than 80-90 percent of river Ganga would be cleaned. In fact, immediately after assuming office, Gadkari had taken several crucial steps in order to fast track the mission and to achieve the desired outcome of cleaning the Ganga in a quick and efficacious manner. He had immediately constituted a special task force comprising of personnel from overlapping ministries such as water resources, urban development, and drinking water and sanitation. This provided the necessary foundation, cleared roadblocks and interlinked various divisions of the project.
Gadkari’s assurances about cleaning river Ganga have turned out to be substantially true. Recently, a team of experts from various institutes and scientific bodies, including the ISRO collected water samples from 20 points in six highly polluted river banks – Ganga Barrage, Bhaironghat, Parmat, Shuklaganj, Jajmau and Wajidpur. The team of experts is on a two-year long project to monitor the quality of the river’s water. It has come to light that acquatic life in the Ganga is set to flourish due to improvement in the river’s water quality. Experts carrying out the research feel that there has been considerable improvement in the level of dissolved oxygen in more than a decade. It is clear that the efforts made to rejuvenate river Ganga under the leadership of union minister Nitin Gadkari have brought about positive results. And now the minister is moving towards cleaning river Yamuna as well. Yamuna has also been subjected to high pollution levels over the past few decades and it is indispensable for the government to clean it as it is the lifeline for a considerable region. Gadkari has his priorities right and it seems that under his leadership, polluted rivers might just become a thing of the past in India.