The main purpose of 'Ganga Action Plan' project, launched in 1985, was

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Make its water pollution free only. The Ganga Action Plan was launched by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in June 1985 with a single, narrowly drawn objective: pollution abatement. Its stated purpose was the interception, diversion and treatment of domestic sewage before it reached the river, and the prevention of toxic and industrial chemical wastes from identified polluting units from entering it. Everything the plan actually built follows from that — trunk sewers, pumping stations, sewage treatment plants, low-cost sanitation, electric and improved wood crematoria, and riverfront works — and nothing in it concerned water supply for farming or the construction of storage works. The word 'only' in the option is not a trap but the point: GAP was deliberately a water-quality programme and not a river-development programme.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Irrigation was never part of GAP's mandate. Canal irrigation from the Ganga is much older and belongs to a different institutional line altogether — the Upper Ganga Canal dates from the 1850s, and irrigation planning sits with irrigation and water-resources departments, not with the pollution-abatement programme launched in 1985.  (b) GAP built no dams. Its physical works were sewage interception and treatment infrastructure. Dam and barrage construction on the Ganga system is a separate policy stream, and if anything the later river-conservation debate has run against new obstructions on the main stem for the sake of environmental flows.  (d) This would only be right if option (c) failed, and it does not. Candidates reach for 'none of the above' here because they know GAP later grew into a much larger river-management effort under the National River Conservation Plan, the National Ganga River Basin Authority and Namami Gange. But the question asks about the main purpose of the 1985 plan itself, and that purpose was pollution abatement.

Concept: The Ganga Action Plan was India's first large river-specific pollution-control programme and it set the template for everything that followed. Its diagnosis was that the river's degradation was driven mainly by untreated municipal sewage from the towns along its banks, with industrial effluent a serious but smaller second, so its instruments were engineering ones: intercept the drains, divert the flow away from the river, treat it, and return it. Phase I, sanctioned at about Rs 862.59 crore, covered 25 Class-I towns — 6 in Uttar Pradesh, 4 in Bihar and 15 in West Bengal. Phase II widened the coverage to 59 towns across five states and generated parallel action plans for the Yamuna, Gomti, Damodar and Mahananda.

State PCS 2022 Q37 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q37 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer