The World Bank said it will give India at least US$1 billion to help clean up the heavily polluted Ganges River 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 on Wednesday.
India’s environment minister hailed the 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 said on Wednesday that the bank was expected to triple lending to India to US$7 billion this year for development, infrastructure and other projects.
The sum is three times the average US$2.3 billion the bank has lent India annually over the past four years.
Zoellick is on a four-day visit to the country.
India already has US$19.57 billion 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 US$7 billion in lending this year, the bank announced in September that it would give US$4.3 billion in loans to help strengthen India’s economy amid the global economic crisis.
Zoellick wrote in the Hindustan Times newspaper on 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,” he wrote.
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