TRADITIONAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN PROMOTING RIVER MANAGEMENT AWARENESS: A CASE OF NAMAMI GANGE DURING MAHA KUMBH 2025 AT PRAYAGRAJ

River conservation is a significant environmental and socio-cultural problem in India, especially for the Ganga River, which supports millions of people and has great religious importance. For the Namami Ganga mission, there have been various government campaigns. The efficiency of conservation efforts has frequently been constrained by conventional awareness campaigns that communicate with the public employing one-way interaction approaches and receive some to evaluate the engagement by the public. Social media and the other digital platforms have the potential to encourage the participants' ecological awareness, but their application and vital for behaviour meaning such as the Maha Kumbh mela. The efficiency of social media efforts to provide ganga protection during Prayagraj's maha Kumbh 2025 is assessed in this work. The study employs a mixed-method approach to assess user engagement measures such as likes, shares, comments, and hashtags to analyse the behavioural intention and public awareness over community analysis and the perceptions of stakeholders, including government representatives, NGOs, and young volunteers, regarding engagement. The outcomes demonstrate a high correlation between user engagement measures and gains in ecological awareness and participation in cleanliness programs. Posts that connected cultural ties to ecological care with spiritual beliefs sparked a lot of communication on Facebook and Instagram.