Prime Minister, Narendra Modi called for an "uncompromising mission-mode approach" to stop further pollution of Ganga river. He chaired the fifth meeting of the National Ganga River Basin Authority on Thursday, with the Chief Ministers of States on the banks of the river.
The States of Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand put across their respective issues affecting the stretch of the river in their States which largely pertained to silt management and single window clearances for proposals from the States.
The Prime Minister urged the States to pay special attention to development of towns and villages located on the banks and to ensure sufficient awareness in these areas to stop pollution. He suggested that the river was associated with faith and devotion among millions of Indians, and the task was to convert these positive sentiments into a feeling of responsibility. He said the task at hand could not be accomplished without the active participation of the common man.
The cleansing of the river had tremendous opportunity to generate economic activities which should be looked into, said the Prime Minister. Union Ministers Arun Jaitley, Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari, Uma Bharati, Birender Singh, Prakash Javadekar, Piyush Goyal, Sanwarlal Jat, and vice-chairman of NITI Aayog Shri Arvind Panagariya were also present at the meeting.
Meanwhile, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee posted on Facebook on Thursday that her State has topped in executing Clean Ganga mission schemes. West Bengal has topped in executing the Clean Ganga schemes amongst the five States as per a recent report on the Ministry of water resources. She added that the data shows Bengal also has the highest number of sanctioned projects and completed 24 out of 30 of them. These projects are being implemented in 24 towns across the State, with a sanctioned cost of Rs1,352 crore.