The World Bank has approved a five-year loan to the Namami Gange project worth ₹3,000 crore ($400 million) to develop and improve infrastructure projects to abate pollution in the river basin. The Namami Ganga or the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) has already received ₹4,535 crore ($600 million) from the World Bank until December 2021 as part of the first phase of the National Ganga River Basin project. So far, 313 projects worth ₹25,000 crore have been sanctioned under the mission.
Some of the projects to be undertaken under the second phase of the mission include spillover projects from the first phase of the mission as well cleaning projects in tributaries such as the Yamuna and Kali rivers.
In the second phase, the loan would fund ₹1,134 crore ($150 million) for three new ‘Hybrid Annuity Projects’ in Agra, Meerut and Saharanpur for the tributaries of the Ganga.
₹1,209 crore ($160 million) is provided for the ongoing DBOT (Design, Build, Operate and Transfer) projects in Buxar, Munger, Begusarai.
Other heads of distribution would include ‘Institutional Development’ ($20 million or ₹151 crore); ‘Improving Investments Resilience to COVID-19 Like Emergency Situations’ ($5 million or ₹38 crore); Performance Based Incentive for Urban Local Bodies ($30 million or ₹226 crore) and Programme Communication and Management ($16 million or ₹121 crore), said a release from the NMCG.
“The government’s Namami Gange Programme has revitalised India’s efforts in rejuvenating the Ganga,” said Junaid Ahmad, World Bank’s Country Director in India. “The first World Bank project helped build critical sewage infrastructure in 20 pollution hotspots along the river, and this project will help scale this up to the tributaries. It will also help the government strengthen the institutions needed to manage a river basin as large and complex as the Ganga Basin.”
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