As the government moves into election mode, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared the Ganga as India's first national river with a separate river basin authority to monitor its cleanliness in the states through which it flows. Singh's decision came at a review meeting at the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) convened within three weeks of his well-publicised meeting with a delegation led by Shankaracharya Swaroopanand Saraswati, who called for a central commission and designating Ganga as a national river.

"A decision was taken to declare the Ganga as a National River and set up a Ganga River Basin Authority as an empowered planning, implementing and monitoring authority for the Ganga River," a PMO statement said on Tuesday. The move comes more than two decades after the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi set up the Central Ganga Authority in 1985.

Singh also referred to the "special place" Ganga has in the hearts and minds of all Indians and stated that this emotional link needs to be recognized. Adding that the country should set up a model for cleaning the river through the new institutional mechanism.

"All programmes would be organised under this authority (Ganga River Basin Authority) in consultation with basin states, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. It is in this way that the people will prove that the river is sacred to them," water resources minister Saifuddin Soz said.

More than 365 million litres of industrial waste flows into the Ganga every day. An official at the water resource ministry said the tag of a national river and an overarching authority would enable the central government to play a more active role.

The powers of the authority would be finalised in consultation with the states concerned. "It was decided that there is a need to replace the current piecemeal efforts taken up in a fragmented manner in select cities with an integrated approach that sees the river as an ecological entity and addresses issues of quantity in terms of water flows along with issues of quality," the Prime Minister's Office said.