In order to finance a new development plan for the Ganga, the Centre plans to tap the debt market with Ganga bonds.

The bonds will be floated by the Ganga River Basin Authority, the empowered organisation to plan, implement and monitor the development of the river. The authority is chaired by the Prime Minister and would have as its members chief ministers of all the states through which the Ganges flows.

A GBA meeting—chaired by TK Nair, principal secretary of the Prime Minister?s office (PMO), and attended by chief secretaries of the five states through which the river passes through—suggested that to ensure that the GBA does not meet the fate of the Ganga Action Plan, which was launched by the government of India with much fanfare in 1985 to reduce the pollution load on the river, GBA should have a strong financial structure.

?We discussed the possibility of arming the authority with the ability to raise resources through market borrowing, apart from supporting it with budgetary allocations. In that way, we can make sure that we are able to avoid the pitfalls that were encountered by GAP, which had meagre resources to complete a task of this magnitude,? said an attendee of the meeting.

After spending roughly Rs 20,000 crore over 23 years, the Ganga Action Plan has terribly failed to reduce the pollution level along the course of the 2,500-km river, which flows from Gangotri in the Himalayas to Ganga Sagar in the Bay of Bengal.

In fact, it also emerged that GBA will not jeopardise UP chief minister Mayawati?s ambitious Ganga Expressway project. This was stated by the Prime Minister?s office on Monday, immediately after the meeting of the GBA got over.

Talking to FE on phone, a senior official of the PMO denied any connection between the GBA and the Ganga Expressway, he said that Monday?s was a preparatory meeting to discuss how an integrated method could be formed to preserve the ecological balance of the national river and was ?in no way connected to an infrastructure project that is being planned by the Uttar Pradesh government.? This was supported by the Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Atul Kumar Gupta.

Ever since the Centre declared Ganga a national river and formed GBA last month, there have been rumours that the authority, which would regulate the ?quantity and quality? of the basin, would act as a nemesis of the much-touted Ganga Expressway.