Essel Infraprojects Ltd, an infrastructure arm of Subhash Chandra-led Essel Group, has announced foundation laying of a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) in Ramana, Varanasi, as a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious Namami Gange Programme. The plant was inaugurated by the Prime Minister on his visit to Varanasi on Friday.

Essel Infra is a public-private partnership (PPP) firm for building the STP of 50 million litres daily (MLD) Sewage capacity. Essel Infra will undertake complete designing, development, finance and construction work of the STP, its Effluent Disposal Pipeline and all associated infrastructure, the company said.

The project is being implemented on Hybrid Annuity-PPP model. The plant is to be constructed in 18 months post which it will be operated and maintained by Essel Infra for the next 15 years.

It will treat 5 crore litres of sewage of Varanasi city daily using SBR (Sequencing Batch Reactors) technology. Currently, the entire sewage is being pushed into the river without any treatment mechanism and is a major source of pollution in the river.

October 2018 was initially set up as a deadline for cleaning the 2,525-km-long Ganga river. Under the ₹20,000-crore National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) programme launched in July 2014, the government has sanctioned 145 projects at an estimated cost of ₹10,730 crore.

According to the data from the Water Resources Ministry published earlier this year, out of the approved projects, 72 were for setting up new STPs of total 932 MLD capacity and rehabilitating ones with total 1,091 MLD capacity and laying/rehabilitating 4,031-km-long sewer network.

However, only around a dozen of projects have been completed so far.

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