Ganga Basin Cities Revolutionize Urban River Management

Ten cities across three states in the Ganga basin are preparing integrated urban river management plans (URMPs) aimed at placing rivers at the centre of city planning rather than treating them as dumping channels for waste and sewage, the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) said on Tuesday.

In a post on X, Namami Gange, the mission's flagship programme for conserving the Ganga river, said the URMP initiative is an attempt to reverse the trend in which cities ended with the dumping of sewage into rivers.

''For most of history, Indian cities have grown with their backs to their rivers. The river was where the drains went.

''Where the waste went. Where the city ended. URMP is an attempt to reverse that,'' the Namami Gange said.

The URMP framework has been pitched as a first-of-its-kind management plan for 10 Ganga basins with one blueprint focused on river-sensitive urban planning.

The first phase covers Rishikesh, Haldwani-Kathgodam and Ramnagar in Uttarakhand; Gorakhpur, Shahjahanpur, Bijnor and Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh; and Chapra, Buxar and Gaya in Bihar.

''Under the urban river management plan framework, 10 Ganga basin cities, from Rishikesh in the Uttarakhand hills down to Gaya in Bihar, are now building a single blueprint that treats the river as central to the city, not peripheral to it,'' it said.

The mission said the framework differs from conventional urban planning approaches, where sewage, riverfront development and stormwater management are handled separately by different departments.

''A URMP does not handle sewage in one department, riverfront in another and stormwater in a third. It integrates all of it -- sewerage, riverfront development, ecological flow, solid waste and stormwater -- into one city-level plan,'' it said.

The mission said the plans are at an advanced stage and currently under state review. It added that project management units (PMUs) have been established for implementation, URMP steering committees have been formed across five Ganga basin states and city-level multi-stakeholder working groups have been active since March 2025.

The programme said while the 10 cities across three states are adopting one approach under the framework, 12 more URMPs are targeted by the end of the financial year 2026-27.

''This is not about cleaning a river once. It is about building cities that do not dirty it in the first place,'' the post said.

(With inputs from agencies.)