India Ahead is a national English news channel offering the latest in politics, national events, business, sports and entertainment. We also bring to you exclusive ground reports from various parts of the country.

If there is one thing that the global crisis of COVID-19 has hammered home, it is the very fragile relationship we share with our environment and with the other species that inhabit and co-inhabit it along with us. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, which are considered as the direct result of how we treat other species in our environment. In this panel discussion, our guests discuss the important actions required to save our environment from degradation and the concept of co-existing with the nature.

A report by Bureau of Indian Standards claims that 11 out of 11 samples taken by them from Delhi and tested in a lab have failed on all 19 parameters of the test. Testing of water samples was conducted to check organoleptic and physical parameters and know the chemical and toxic substances and bacteriological quality besides virological and biological parameters. Arvind Kejriwal is calling it fallacious and politically motivated. (00:01 to 29:00 mins)

Why isn't environment becoming an election issue despite growing awareness among people about pollution and depleting natural resources? Ravish Kumar says that as he travelled across Delhi, Haryana, UP and Bihar during his road shows highlighting concerns of voters, one thing that was common was the scarcity of clean drinking water, depleting green cover and polluted air. Also on the show, Sunita Narain, Director, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) says that our municipalities haven't been empowered to find solutions for waste disposal.

1 billion people in India, or 100 million more than the number of voters we have in India, live in water scarcity! And this number is expected to go up to 5 billion by 2050. This is the appalling statistic that has come out from research by Water Aid on Monday. Club this with the fact that one in every eight deaths in India is attributable to air pollution in India, the Ganga River is far dirtier than what it was a few years back and the health cost of environmental challenges can go up to 3% of our GDP, which is higher than our health budget.

This is truly India's shame. Why did 87-year-old GD Agarwal die after he spent years fighting to save the Ganga? The veteran activist was fasting for 111 days, demanding that the government get serious about cleaning up the Ganga. His death shows that despite all the big promises and the big slogans, the effort to clean up the river has been a hollow promise.

On Prime Time, Ravish Kumar asks whether the government has done anything at all to revive River Ganga till now. Even though the PM Modi had spoken about the neglect that the river had been suffering all these years before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, has the current NDA government been able accomplish their goals of cleaning up the river? Professor GD Agarwal recently breathed his last after nearly 3 months of fasting in protest demanding an action plan to clean River Ganga. How many more such environmentalists are to lose their lives in their fight to save the national river?

Ganga, the 2600-km-long trans-boundary river of India, has witnessed "unprecedented low levels of water in several lower reaches" in the last few summer seasons. This is as per a study undertaken by a professor of IIT-Kharagpur.

Every minute, one garbage truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans. About 8 million metric tons of plastic are thrown into the ocean annually. Of those, 236,000 tons are microplastics. Tiny pieces of broken-down plastic smaller than our little fingernail. The billions upon billions of items of plastic waste choking our oceans, lakes, and rivers and piling up on land is more than unsightly and harmful to plants and wildlife. The report focuses on the long term impact on the marine life and humanity as whole