IANS/New Delhi
The Supreme Court yesterday asked the government not to give a bureaucratic answer about its plan to clean up the Ganges river and instead unveil a stage-by-stage timeline for effective monitoring.
“Don’t give us a vision plan, an artist’s view. It may take 200 years to implement,” said a bench of Justices T S Thakur and R Banumathi.
“We don’t know if it (cleaning the river) will happen in our generation,” the judges said.
“Can you indicate the stages through which this plan has to move and the time involved in each stage?” asked Thakur as Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar started reading from a 29-page affidavit starting with the 1985 first Ganga Action Plan.
The court wanted to be enlightened by “someone who has a comprehensive view of how Ganga would be made pollution free, nitty-gritty of the plan, and how the milestones can be achieved.”
The 2,525km-long Ganges, known in India as Ganga, which originates in the Himalayas, is considered the holiest of rivers by Hindus.
The court told Kumar that the government had given a “very bureaucratic answer” to its question, and wanted to know how much will be achieved during the new government’s five-year term.
During the last hearing on August 13, the court had sought the status report on the government’s action plan to clean the Ganges along with a roadmap.
The court had also sought a report on what the government was doing to clean the river from Gangotri up to Haridwar in the first phase.
Justice Thakur observed: “But for nature, it (the river) would have been worse. It is nature that is doing a lot of cleaning.”
The judges told the solicitor general that if the polluting industries needed to be relocated the court could assist the government with legal process.
Meanwhile, Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti stressed on cleaning the Yamuna river during a visit to the ghats in Mathura.
The minister visited Mathura in Uttar Pradesh when she changed her plan to go to Barsana to attend the birthday celebrations of Radha, beloved of Lord Krishna.
She visited the main Vishram Ghat, Swami Ghat and the sewage pumping station at Masani. She also visited the Keshi Ghat in Vrindavan. She was shocked to see the open discharge from the drains into the river.
Accompanied by senior officials, she spent several hours visiting the ghats along the river and also interacted with the local residents.
Mathura is one of the seven cities earmarked by the central government for heritage conservation and revival.