Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Uma Bharti and Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu launched Smart Ganga City Scheme in ten important cities.
Ten cities chosen in the first phase of the project are Rishikesh and Haridwar in Uttrakhand; Mathura, Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi and Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh; Patna in Bihar; Sahibganj in Jharkhand and Barrackpore in West Bengal.
National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) has chosen these cities in the first phase for infrastructure development for sewage treatment. This will be on hybrid annuity mode based on PPP model.
In the hybrid annuity model, a part of capital investment (up to 40 percent) will be paid by government through construction linked milestones and the balance amount through an annuity over the contract duration up to 20 years to ensure longevity.
The focus of the Centrally-sponsored programme, which will be extended to other cities, would be to build and upgrade sewage treatment infrastructure and improve drainage networks.
The work would be done based on hybrid annuity model in which first 40 per cent of the project cost will be paid by the government annually over a fixed period to the developer while the remaining 60 per cent will be disbursed on the basis of the quality of the asset created.
In previous schemes, Centre and states have borne 70 per cent of the costs for setting up sewage treatment plants (STPs). Now the programme will be completely Centre-sponsored.
This is the first time that the Centre’s assistance in a project is 100 per cent for 15 years.
An outlay of Rs 20,000 crore was approved for the clean Ganga mission by the Centre in 2014. In five Ganga basin states, a total of 7,030 million litres of sewage is generated per day. Out of this, about 4,200 MLD sewage is treated.
For the first time, government is also trying to entrench a mechanism as per which the treated water will be used by the industries. This would not only result in leaving more fresh water for domestic and other uses but would also ensure automatic check on the quality of treated water. The Cabinet has already passed a resolution on this issue.
In the budget 2014, the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced an integrated Ganga development project titled ‘Namami Ganga’ and allocated ₹2,037 crore for this purpose.
‘Namami Gange’ will focus on pollution abatement interventions namely Interception, diversion and treatment of waste water flowing through the open drains through bio-remediation / appropriate in-situ treatment / use of innovative technologies / sewage treatment plants (STPs) / effluent treatment plant (ETPs); rehabilitation and augmentation of existing STPs and immediate short term measures for arresting pollution at exit points on river front to prevent inflow of sewage etc.