Environmentalist says River Ganges clean up plan "fiasco"

A multi-billion rupee action plan to clean up the River Ganges launched by the Indian government 17 years ago has "totally collapsed", the Indian environmentalist M.C. Mehta said on Sunday, according to the Indian news agency PTI.

Mehta said he had taken India's minister of state for the environment Saiffuddin Soz along a "long journey" down the river to prove how the project had turned into a "major fiasco" .

The 2000-year old holy city of Varanasi was today a "stink-hole" with the river turned into a sludge of faecal matter.

"Despite this serious situation as many as 80,000 people use the bathing ghats daily on average," he said.

Mehta said that at Khamboli near Varanasi the entire ground water up to a depth of 120 feet was completely polluted and contaminated to the extent that the pumped water was jet-black, while in Dinapur a sewage treatment plant had turned into a "serious health hazard".

The environmentalist, who has camapaigned against pollution in Delhi and near the Taj Mahal, said a review commissioned by the environment ministry seven years ago had warned that the public's participation was vital for the success of the project but he said the report had been put into "cold storage." "Seven years after this study nothing has been done by the government to involve the masses in the clean-up programme.

I was shocked to find that even the mayors of these major cities, along the banks of the river, had no idea of the project programmes," Mehta said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.