Ganga Expressway - Motivation

Motivation

The infrastructure development department of the Government of Uttar Pradesh, in its 2007 proposal request for Ganga Expressway, explained the motivation for Ganga Expressway. The government claimed every year many parts of the state of Uttar Pradesh face flooding of Ganga on its left bank, resulting in loss of life, usable land and property. To mitigate this problem the state government's irrigation department proposed the construction of a bund (embankment) along the left bank of river Ganga from Narora to UP/Bihar Border (Ghazipur). The state government decided to use this necessary embankment and build an access-controlled eight-lane expressway on top of the embankment. The government claims the following benefits as its motivation in the proposal:

  • Provide flood protection to large population and number of villages along river
  • Decongest the increasing traffic on the existing network of roads
  • Fast and safe connectivity resulting in savings in fuel, travel time and transportation cost to society
  • Reduction in accidents
  • Reduction in pollution
  • Employment opportunity to people
  • Development of local industry, agriculture and handicrafts
  • Development of tourism and pilgrimage
  • Transporting, processing and marketing of agricultural products
  • Better approach to medical and educational services
  • Quick transportation of perishable goods like fruits, vegetables and dairy products

According to the Indian Red Cross, the Indian sub-continent is highly prone to droughts and floods. Floods are the most regular and devastating, with an average of 18.6 million hectare of land flooded annually, and the Indian Red Cross Society identified over 40 million hectare of the land as flood prone.

According to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, between 1990-2000, about 30 million people were affected by disasters every year, over 4000 people lost their lives every year in India, and the nation suffers heavy losses in economic assets from these disasters every year. In this report, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs claims it is the poor and the under-privileged who are worst affected by natural disasters; additionally, these disasters retard socio-economic development, further impoverishing the impoverished. The routine flood relief, drought relief, and other disaster relief efforts lead to diversion of scarce resources from development to rehabilitation and reconstruction.

The Ganga basin floods are frequent. The river Ganga and some tributaries of Ganga in the state of Uttar Pradesh, flood more than once every year. Uttar Pradesh has experienced massive flooding in 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2008. At least 2000 people were killed in Uttar Pradesh in 1998 floods alone. The incidence of flood is frequent mainly in the eastern Ganga Plain regions, and 30 districts of the state of Uttar Pradesh are prone to flooding. The exact location of flooding along the river Ganga in the state of Uttar Pradesh changes every year because of changing water flows, local pollution and rainfall patterns in Ganga's tributaries: Sharada, Rapti, Chhoti Gandak, Ghaghara, Great Gandak, Burhi Gandak and Kosi., The routine flooding inundates, destroys and pollutes on average over 237,000 hectares of farms and wetlands every year in eastern Uttar Pradesh. The Ganga Expressway project proposes to dedicate 15,120 hectares of land to build flood-preventing embankment and an expressway on top of this embankment.

Read more about this topic:  Ganga Expressway

Famous quotes containing the word motivation:

    Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we’re talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.
    June Jordan (b. 1939)