Ganga’s most polluted stretch in its journey from Gaumukh to Gangasagar is in Kanpur. And that’s no surprise — the city generates over 450 million litres of municipal sewage and industrial effluent daily and a majority of it was flowing directly into the Ganga until recently.

Around 140 million litres of waste, mostly domestic sewage but also untreated waste water from slaughter houses in Fazalganj, was flowing into the holy river through just one drain, the Sisamau Nala.

The drain, often referred to as the “largest drain in Asia”, was being used as a sewerage conveyance channel since the 1890s. A network of multiple tributary drains with a total length of approximately 13 km, the Sisamau Nala was fully tapped and diverted to sewage treatment plants (STPs) in the city in 2018.

Later today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in Kanpur to hold the first meeting of the National Council for Ganga, will inspect the arrangements made to divert the drain as he commutes by boat from Atal Ghat to Sisamau Nala.

The drain’s diversion, completed in 2018, was done in two stages.

In the first stage, the drain was intercepted at Bakar Mandi. Around 80 million litres of sewage is tapped here daily and is pumped through the Rakhi Mandi Pumping Station to the Bingawan STP, which has a treatment capacity of 210 million litres daily (MLD).