Namami Gange: 199 Sewerage Projects Worth Rs 31,327 Crore Taken Up

A government note issued on 21 October 2026 sets out how sewage is being treated under the Namami Gange Programme, the integrated conservation mission launched in 2014 with the twin aims of cutting pollution in the National River Ganga and reviving it. Its pillars run from sewerage treatment infrastructure, river-front development and river-surface cleaning to biodiversity, afforestation, public awareness, industrial effluent monitoring and Ganga Gram.

How much has been built

Sewage treatment sits at the centre of the pollution control effort. The programme has taken up 199 sewerage infrastructure projects estimated at Rs 31,327 crore, and 116 of them are finished.

A technology-neutral mission

The mission does not tie itself to one process. Depending on the town, the land available and the nature of the sewage, it uses the conventional activated sludge process, the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket, sequential batch reactors, moving bed biofilm reactors, fluidized aerated beds and the food chain reactor, besides electrocoagulation, constructed wetlands and packaged units.

New technologies on the ground

The Food Chain Reactor came to India through this mission; it adds fixed artificial media and plant roots to the usual process and needs less land and less power. Five such plants are working, two at Bhatpara in West Bengal and three at Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh, and one more is coming up at Bhagalpur in Bihar at about 175 square metres per MLD. In the hills of Uttarakhand, where cold and poor access rule out other methods, electrocoagulation units have been put up at places such as Badrinath and Chamoli.

Building upward and with nature

At Muni Ki Reti in Chandreshwar Nagar stands the country's first four-storey sewage treatment plant built for a municipality under the mission. Short of land, the 7.5 MLD plant was raised vertically on about 900 square metres, needing roughly 120 square metres per MLD against about 400 for the conventional option. At Bithoor in Uttar Pradesh, a town of about 20,000 people, six constructed wetlands built on the drains themselves treat close to 2 MLD and have pulled the biochemical oxygen demand down from around 75 mg per litre to under 10 mg per litre.