The Ganga Action Plan was initiated during the year

Concept: Dating a national environmental programme means separating three distinct events in its life cycle — the constitution of the governing authority created to run it, the formal launch of the programme itself, and the sanction of any later phases. Institutional groundwork usually precedes execution, so the year an apex authority is set up and the year the programme is initiated need not be the same. Initiation is dated to the formal launch, when funded execution actually begins.

Application: The Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was India’s first river-cleaning programme, built on interception and diversion of municipal sewage, construction of sewage treatment plants, and control of industrial effluent discharged along the river. Its life cycle runs as follows.

1. The Central Ganga Authority, the apex body created to steer the effort, was constituted in February 1985 — institutional groundwork, not the launch.

2. The Ganga Action Plan Phase-I was formally launched by the Prime Minister at Varanasi on 14 June 1986, covering Class-I towns along the river in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

3. Phase-I set out to restore the river’s water quality to bathing-class standards by intercepting, diverting and treating the sewage flowing into it.

Cross-check: test each offered year against that life cycle.

• 1988, 1990 and 1992 do not mark the start of the plan. GAP Phase-II was sanctioned in stages from 1993, and the river-cleaning effort was later subsumed into the National River Conservation Plan in the mid-1990s.

• Some government summaries trace the programme’s origin to 1985, the year the Central Ganga Authority was constituted. That year is not among the choices; the formal launch year recorded by the National Mission for Clean Ganga, the Ministry of Environment and Forests annual report for 1987–88 and Press Information Bureau releases is 1986.

Result: the Ganga Action Plan was initiated in 1986.