NEW DELHI: India has spent less than a quarter of the funds available for a program to clean up the Ganges river over the last two years, a federal audit has found, citing lapses in planning and financial management of a flagship scheme.

The government had only used $260 million of the $1.05 billion earmarked for the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) program between April 2015 and March 2017, according to the report from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. The water quality in eight of 10 towns surveyed along the Ganges did not meet outdoor bathing standards.

“The performance audit revealed deficiencies in financial management, planning, implementation and monitoring, which led to delays in achievement of milestones,” the auditor said in its 160-page report which was presented to parliament last week.

The water resources ministry, which runs the NMCG, did not respond to a request for comment.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration committed $3 billion in 2015 for a five-year project to clean the 2,525-km (1,570-mile) river that remains heavily polluted despite being a water source for 400 million people.

Modi, who represents the holy city of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges, had made a clean-up of the Ganges one of his key campaign promises in the 2014 presidential election.

The Ganges is arguably one of the most revered rivers in the world - and one of the most polluted. It is worshipped by Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people. They call it Ganga Mata, or mother Ganga, and believe a dip in the river absolves a lifetime of sins.

But the river, which stretches from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, is also a destination for waste produced by hundreds of factories - over three-quarters of the sewage generated in the towns and cities of India’s crowded northern plains flows untreated into the Ganges.

When a Reuters reporter visited northern Kanpur city in March, the river in most parts of the town appeared black in color, with its many factories and tanneries dumping waste into the Ganges. The federal auditor’s report contained pictures of untreated sewage being discharged directly into the river in several states.