New Delhi: More than a decade after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made cleaning the Ganga a defining promise of his first election campaign, much of the river is no clearer than before, according to an investigation by Bloomberg News published on November 6. Satellite imagery covering a decade, and water tests carried out by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, point to a river still struggling with sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff.The Wire had reported two years ago how, even though the union government has pumped in almost Rs 40,000 crore into the flagship programme since 2014, several concerns – including dysfunctional sewage treatment plants and bad governance – abound.Only a tenth of the Ganga shows lasting improvementBloomberg’s Shruti Srivastava, Krishna Karra and Lou Del Bello analysed nearly 2,000 kilometres of the river using imagery from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 and NASA Landsat satellites. It tracked turbidity, which measures how muddy the water is, algae growth driven by sewage and fertiliser runoff, and surface temperature.Only about 10% of the river shows sustained improvement in water clarity. Another 20% grows clearer in the dry season but deteriorates after the monsoon, and roughly a quarter is becoming muddier even in the dry months, when pollution is most concentrated. In the months after the monsoon, nearly 80% of the river is getting muddier.Clearer water is not necessarily cleaner water. In roughly half of the stretches that have become clearer, the satellites point to more algae in the dry season, which can drain oxygen and harm aquatic life.Kanpur’s water fails, from the surface to the borewellSatellites cannot detect chemicals, heavy metals or pathogens, so Bloomberg commissioned scientists from IIT Kharagpur to test river water, irrigation channels and groundwater across 12 locations around Kanpur and Varanasi.In Kanpur, every Ganga sample exceeded the government’s benchmark for biochemical oxygen demand in bathing water, at about 1.5 times the permissible level. The readings were more than twice the stricter benchmark for water used as a drinking source. The samples were collected during the monsoon, when higher flows dilute contaminants five to 20 times, so dry-season concentrations could be several times higher, said Abhijit Mukherjee, a professor at IIT Kharagpur whose laboratory did the testing.The contamination was not limited to the river. A channel carrying treated tannery wastewater and household waste for irrigation recorded chemical oxygen demand of 148 milligrams per litre, which the laboratory described as severe organic pollution. Groundwater from a borewell in Jana village had fluoride more than four times the permissible limit and nitrate more than twice the limit.The money and the gapRoughly Rs 43,060 crore had been allocated to the programme by the end of September, though a little over half has been spent, partly because of bureaucratic delays, a hybrid financing model and slow execution by local bodies. That is more than ten times what governments authorised for earlier cleanup programmes between 1985 and 2014.The Ganga basin generates about 12 billion litres of sewage a day, while completed projects can treat only about a third of it, according to government data. Cities along the main stem discharge around 3 billion litres a day against treatment capacity of about 1 billion. Industry contributes about 20% of the pollution by volume, but its waste is often toxic and does not break down, and it is concentrated around Kanpur and along the Ramganga and Kali tributaries, home to tanneries, distilleries, and paper and sugar mills.Penalties have been modest. In Bihar, authorities issued orders last year for Rs 8.2 crore in compensation from 10 plants that did not comply with norms, according to a document filed with the National Green Tribunal.Why it is hardExperts quoted by Bloomberg point to governance, not construction. Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic adviser, said India does well on visible projects that attract political attention, but that tasks needing sustained coordination between the Centre, states and local bodies lag behind. Ambika Vishwanath of the Kubernein Initiative said Namami Gange was the first effort to treat the whole basin as a unit, yet began without comprehensive data. “We’re trying to solve a problem without the correct information,” she said.Srinivas Chokkakula of the Centre for Policy Research said the programme is tackling an accumulated deficit in infrastructure and governance, and that large investments must be matched by urban governance, local institutional capacity and regulatory oversight.What the government saysWater minister C.R. Patil told Bloomberg the government wants results and hopes the river will be fit for bathing before the 2029 general election. He said the government decided in September to revamp the mission, using drone surveys to map drains from the river’s source to West Bengal and funnelling smaller drains into larger channels that feed treatment plants. Newer sewage technology, he said, would allow plants to be built more cheaply and on smaller sites, and cleaning the river will also require changing human behaviour.In 2024, too, infrastructure outran governanceThe findings recall concerns raised when the programme turned ten. As The Wire reported in May 2024, the Union government told the Lok Sabha on February 8 that year that 457 projects worth Rs 38,438.05 crore had been taken up under Namami Gange until December 31, 2023, of which only 280 had been completed and made operational. Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People told Bloomberg that the emphasis had been on money, infrastructure and technology, while governance, including whether sewage treatment plants actually work, had not been addressed.