To effectively plan and monitor the Government of India’s flagship Clean Ganga Mission, National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding MoU today at New Delhi. The objective of the MoU is to utilize the geospatial and crowd-sourcing technologies for pollution monitoring in river Ganga. Shri TVSN Prasad, Mission Director, NMCG and Shri PG Diwakar, Deputy Director, Remote Sensing Applications Area, NRSC, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) signed the MoU in the presence of Union Minister of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Sushri Uma Bharti.  Speaking on the occasion the Minister said ISRO’s participation in the Clean Ganga Mission is need of hour.  She emphasized on focusing the key issues related with the cleaning of river Ganga as per the situation demanded.  

After signing of MoU, the Minister launched Bhuvan Ganga Mobile Application and Web Portal. Bhuvan Ganga Portal is an exclusive web portal deployed in ISRO Bhuvan’s geoportal with all geospatial layers related to river Ganga. It will be used as a tool to support decision making and planning for the Clean Ganga Mission. Bhuvan Mobile App is a user-friendly android based application to enable public to collect and report information on various pollution sources that affects the water quality of river Ganga. This mobile app will provide a platform for crowd sourcing to monitor pollution in river Ganga and enable decision makers to prioritize interventions. The first version of the application is made available for download in the Bhuvan Ganga web portal (http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/ganga).

NMCG has identified the need of utilizing the space and other cutting-edge technologies for effective planning and monitoring the activities taken up for Clean Ganga Mission. NMCG and NRSC have found it mutually rewarding to partner for utilizing space technology in the Clean Ganga Mission and have agreed to have a long term partnership through this MoU. Both the parties would work together in the areas of applying geospatial technology in the various aspects of Clean Ganga initiative. The areas of mutual interest as identified include, use of geospatial technology for water quality monitoring, development of mobile application for enabling community participation in monitoring / up-linking of field data, customizing Bhuvan geoportal for visualizing, query and analysis of datasets related to Ganga basin and Co-ordinate and initiate necessary linkages with other agencies, with regard to geo-spatial database and web-based applications for river water quality monitoring.

Samir/jk