Jamshedpur: A 40-member team, including 20 women, will undertake a month-long rafting expedition “Mission Gange” in October, said Bachendri Pal, chief of Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (TSAF). The team would be led by Ms. Pal, the first Indian woman to climb the Mount Everest. Twenty-six employees of Tata Steel would be part of the expedition. The objective of the “Mission Gange” was to clean the river Ganga and spread awareness on waste management, Ms. Pal said at a press conference on Thursday. Ms. Pal said the team would move to Haridwar after assembling at Delhi on October 3.
The expedition will start from Haridwar on October 5 and traverse through Bijnor, Farukhabad, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Buxar and end at Patna on October 30, Ms. Pal informed. The team will be covering a distance of 1500 km downstream during the expedition. The members of the team will stay at each destination for 2/3 days, and they will organise cleaning and awareness drives with the help of local support, she said. The garbage that will be collected from river Ganga during the expedition will be disposed properly with the help of local municipal bodies. The team will also visit schools and other institutions to create awareness on waste management, pollution in Ganga and climate change, she said.
“We have been greatly inspired by our Prime Minister Modiji’s ‘Namami Gange’ campaign for cleaning the Ganga, a truly life-sustaining source of our country,” Ms. Pal claimed. Union Minister of State for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, Arjun Ram Meghwal will join the team at Haridwar to boost the morale of the team, she added. The expedition was being supported by the Government of India and Tata Steel, she said. The team would have eight Everesters -R S Pal, BinitaSoren, Chetna Sahoo, Poonam Rana, and Swarnlata Dalai, Hemant Gupta, Premlata Agarwal, Bachendri Pal-, five IIT graduates and a radio jockey representing various parts of the country will be part of the team, she added.
NDTV – Dettol Banega Swachh India campaign lends support to the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Helmed by Campaign Ambassador Amitabh Bachchan, the campaign aims to spread awareness about hygiene and sanitation, the importance of building toilets and making India open defecation free (ODF) by October 2019, a target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014. Over the years, the campaign has widened its scope to cover issues like air pollution, waste management, plastic ban, manual scavenging and menstrual hygiene. The campaign has also focused extensively on marine pollution, clean Ganga Project and rejuvenation of Yamuna, two of India’s major river bodies
