Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Dec 30: Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the second National Ganga Council (NGC) meeting today in Kolkata, through video conference.
Along with the Chief Ministers of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, the meeting was also attended by other Union Ministers who are council members.
Tejashwi Yadav, the deputy chief minister of Bihar, attended the meeting in place of Nitish Kumar, the chief minister.
After conducting the final rituals for his mother Heeraben, who passed away early this morning, the prime minister virtually joined the meeting. PM Modi virtually opened a number of Indian Railways projects as well.
The National Ganga Council has been entrusted with the general management of the Ganga River and its tributaries’ revitalization and prevention of pollution.
The Namami Gange Program is an integrated conservation mission that the Central Government approved in June 2014 as a “Flagship Program” with a budget investment of 20,000 crore to achieve the twin goals of effective pollution reduction and conservation and revitalization of the national river Ganga.
Projects for the development of sewage infrastructure in the Ganga basin totaling around 2,700 were accepted at the 46th meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG).
According to a Ministry of Jal Shakti announcement, 12 of the approved projects are for the construction of sewage infrastructure in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal totaling more than 2,700 crore.
The UN recently recognised the Namami Gange initiative as one of the Top 10 World Restoration Flagships programmes focused on recovering the natural world.
On World Restoration Day in Montreal, Canada, at a celebration for the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), G. Asok Kumar, the Director General of the Namami Gange project, accepted the award.
