NEW DELHI: Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari on Sunday participated in a drive to clean the river Yamuna. The event was organised as part of the Sparsh Ganga campaign.
“We must also adopt policies that were implemented to clean the Ganga river before the Kumbh Mela. A sewage treatment plant was set up to stop waste from the bigger sewage pipelines from entering the Ganga river. Artificial oxygen was used to clean the sewage pipelines; plants were grown across these sewage pipelines so that the untreated waste and garbage was collected and did not flow into the Ganga river. We are committed to cleaning Ma Ganga and cleaning the Yamuna is a part of that goal,” Tiwari said.
Delhi generates 327 crore litres of sewage daily but has a capacity to treat only 276 crore litres.
The Yamuna Action Plan (YAP) -I was taken up between 1993 and 2003, and Yamuna Action Plan-II was extended in 2003 to cover Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, along with Delhi.
Eleven projects were taken up by the National Mission for Clean Ganga to conserve the river, with the action plan primarily targeting three major drainage zones—Kondli, Rithala and Okhla. Nine projects were started at the end of the year 2018 in the NCR region under the aegis of Yamuna Action Plan-III.
The Sparsh Ganga campaign was started in 2009 to clean the Ganga from its source in the Himalayas and along its journey to the Bay of Bengal.
Arushi Nishank, the national convenor of Sparsh Ganga, said, “In cleaning campaigns we include steps to check the throwing of plastics into the river, converting the biodegradable waste into manure, reprocessing the non-degradable waste along the river stretch, checking the drains from carrying dirt into the Yamuna, and creating awareness on the importance of rivers”.