Govt approves $1 billion World Bank loan to clean Ganga river

The cabinet approved a $1 billion loan from the World Bank on Thursday, a government statement said, to fund an eight-year project to clean the River Ganges, larges stretches of which are heavily polluted by industrial and domestic waste.

The 2,510-kilometre-long river that runs from a glacier in the western Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, supports over 400 million of India's 1.1 billion population.

The government has planned to end discharge of untreated waste into the Ganges by 2020.