Ganga Action Plan(GAP): The Challenge of ‘Regulatory Quality’

The largest river basin of India, the Ganges (locally referred as Ganga) is one of the most important river systems in the world. It is home to almost one tenth of the world’s population. Billions of litres of sewage, industrial waste, thousands of animal and human corpses are also released into the river every day. Consequently, the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched in 1985 for pollution abatement as a Federal and state sponsored scheme and till date, three phases have been implemented. Even after establishing numerous institutional arrangements under the GAP and investing billions of dollars there has been no major improvement in the Ganges river water quality, in fact it has further deteriorated. Clearly governmental intervention through pollution control policies, specifically regulation has failed miserably. Therefore, an attempt has been made to analyse empirically, the legal and institutional framework of the GAP using the transdisciplinary method ‘economic analysis of law’. The results reveal that the chief underlying reason for ineffective GAP regulations is lack of a well-defined legal basis.