Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said that on June 1, the ancient and holy city of Varanasi will cast its vote and Narendra Modi, who has been its MP for 10 years, has spent 10 years promising to revive the Ganga.

“One of the outgoing PM’s first steps was to rebrand Mission Ganga, launched in 2009, into Namami Gange. Mission Ganga had two key objectives: Nirmal Ganga (Clean Ganga), and Aviral Ganga (Continuous Ganga with an uninterrupted flow of water). Prime Minister Modi’s Namami Gange fully abandoned the objective of an Aviral Ganga,” he claimed.

The Manmohan Singh government had also set up the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) in 2009 to coordinate state and central government initiatives on the Ganga, he said.

“Even this important institution was first rebranded as the National Council for River Ganga, and then put in cold storage for ten years by the outgoing PM. It has met just 2 times in 10 years and has not met since 2022,” he said.

Ramesh, a former environment minister, said that finally, in a historic move, a consortium of seven IITs had come together and prepared a Ganga River Basin Action Plan for the protection and rejuvenation of Ganga River Basin.