World Bank to help clean India's Ganges

Yahoo News 2 Dec 09;

NEW DELHI (AFP) – The World Bank said Wednesday it will give India at least one billion dollars to help clean up the heavily polluted holy river Ganges as part of moves to sharply hike lending to the country.

The Ganges clean-up involves building modern sewage treatment, revamping drains and other measures to improve the quality of the sacred river which has been badly dirtied by industrial chemicals, farm pesticides and other sewage.

"The World Bank is helping the government of India in its recently launched program to clean and conserve the Ganga (Ganges) River with an initial assistance of one billion dollars to be provided over the next four-to-five years," the multilateral lender said in a statement.

India's environment minister hailed the World Bank's support for cleaning up the river, known to Hindus as "the Mother Ganges."

"This is a project of enormous national importance and I am pleased that the World Bank has come forward to assist us," Ramesh said at a joint news conference in New Delhi with visiting World Bank chief Robert Zoellick.

The announcement came after the finance ministry earlier Wednesday said the World Bank was expected to triple lending this year to India to seven billion this year for development, infrastructure and other projects.

The sum is three times the average 2.3 billion dollars the Bank has loaned India annually over the past four years.

Zoellick is on a four-day visit to the country.

India already has 19.57 billion dollars in World Bank loans that are supporting 68 development, infrastructure and other projects and is the Washington-based financial institution's biggest borrower.

As part of the seven billion dollars in lending this year, the World Bank in September announced 4.3 billion dollars in loans to help strengthen India's economy amid the global economic crisis.

Zoellick wrote in the Hindustan Times newspaper Wednesday that India faces enormous challenges.

But "if it can remove (infrastructure) bottlenecks that slow its economy, then India is well positioned to become one of the new poles of global growth."

The world financial system "needs to accommodate India and other powers whose growth rates far exceed those of developed countries," Zoellick said.

As India's economy returns to growth rates of eight-to-nine per cent, "we can expect it to grow not only as a market but as a supplier of a range of services and increasingly knowledge-intensive goods," Zoellick said.

Earlier this week, India reported quarterly growth rose 7.9 percent from a year earlier, underscoring what analysts said has been the country's faster-than-expected recovery from the global slump.

The finance ministry said Mukherjee pressed Zoellick for swift completion of reforms to give a greater voice to developing nations at the World Bank.

In September, leaders at a Group of 20 summit in the US city of Pittsburgh backed plans to give developing countries greater voting rights at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

World Bank To Loan India $1 bln To Clean up Ganges
Author: C.J. Kuncheria, PlanetArk 3 Dec 09;

NEW DELHI - The World Bank will loan India $1 billion over the next five to seven years to clean up the Ganges, the holy river that is one of the world's most polluted, the country's environment minister said on Wednesday.

The lender will also help India access $4 billion in funds for stopping dumping of untreated waste into the Ganges, according to a joint statement issued by Minister Jairam Ramesh and World Bank President Rober Zoellick in the Indian capital.

The 2,510-kilometre-long river that runs from a glacier in the western Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, supports over 400 million of India's 1.1 billion population.

Sewage and industrial effluents pour into much of its course through India's most populated states, reducing its capacity to support life and making it unfit for human or animal use. Floating corpses are a common sight as Hindus believe cremation on the river banks leads to salvation.

The government has planned to end discharge of untreated waste into the Ganges by 2020.

Earlier attempts to clean the river have failed, including a plan to make its water drinkable by 1989.

(Editing by Chris Pizzey)