The Centre has responded positively to the state government's request to send a high-level team to study the problem of silt in the Ganga.

A central team headed by Amarjit Singh, secretary in the Union ministry of water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation, will visit Bihar on June 5 for discussions with the state water resources department.

"The central team is going to Bihar after the Prime Minister's Office issued a note for looking into the siltation issue," a senior official in the Union ministry told The Telegraph on Wednesday. "Apart from the secretary, experts on the subject will go to Bihar. Help would also be taken from central agencies that work under the ministry and whose experts are stationed in Bihar to look into the details of the problem and find solutions."

One of the issues chief minister Nitish Kumar had discussed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on May 27 was the siltation problem in the state. Nitish had specifically requested Modi to send the central team before June 10 when the monsoon sets in for Bihar. Once the rainy season gains momentum, it becomes difficult to gauge the silt problem with the river swollen with water.

The state government has been raising the silt issue regularly, and has also organised two big conferences this year - one in Patna and another in Delhi - in which experts had deliberated on the problem.

Uma visit

Uma Bharti, Union minister for water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation, will be in Bihar on June 1 and 2 as part of her fortnight-long Ganga Nirikshan Yatra from Gangasagar in Bengal to Gangotri in Uttarakhand. The tour is to inspect the projects under the Centre's National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), also called Namami Gange.

"The minister would be holding Ganga choupal at Sultanganj, Munger, Ara and Buxar," said NMCG director-general U.P. Singh.

The minister will interact with people who live along the Ganga's banks, he explained.

Major work on in the state under the Namami Gange project include development of a 1,163km sewerage network in Patna and setting up sewage-treatment plants with total capacity of 308 million litres per day (MLD) so that dirty water does not go into the Ganga. Patna generates about 290 MLD of drainage and has three plants that can treat just 109 MLD of sewage.