India’s river inter-linking plan dropped

India drops plan for country-wide inter-linking of rivers fearing ecology damage.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre, after having vacillated for the last 5 years, has finally abandoned the ambitious project planned by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to inter-link the rivers in India.

The ambitious scheme, estimated to cost around Rs 5,60,000 crore, was intended to solve the country’s persistent shortage of water for drinking and irrigation.

However, Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh said the plan to inter-ink the rivers was rejected on the grounds that such a scheme will cause a “human, economic and an ecological disaster.”

The question of inter-linking of rivers, he added, has international ramifications, too, with Nepal and Bangladesh having already expressed their fears over the project. Bangladesh even went to the extent of lodging a complaint against India at the UN.

Jairam Ramesh’s announcement of discarding the colossal project comes about a month after Rahul Gandhi, MP and Congress general secretary, described the whole idea as “disastrous” at a news conference in Chennai. Rahul Gandhi had argued that the river-linking project is not only not economically feasible but also “extremely dangerous” to India’s environment.

When reporters pointed out that the UPA government had in fact considered some river-linking schemes and even finalised a few among them, Jairam Ramesh sought to explain the matter by saying that the government was not against any projects intended to transfer waters on local and inter-basin levels like linking the Betwa river and the Ken, and the Krishna and the Godavari, which were cleared by the previous UPA government.

The minister clarified that, in future, all other river-linking projects would be taken up on a “case-to-case” basis.

It may be noted that, while stepping down as Prime Minister after the National Democratic Alliance was defeated in the elections held in May 2004, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had personally wrote to Manmohan Singh, his successor, requesting the latter to go ahead with his two ambitious schemes – one, the inter-linking of the rivers in the country; the other, the Golden Quadrilateral plan that would connect the country’s 4 metros directly through road.

In October 2002, Prime Minister Vajpayee had formed a task force to get the river-linking project going, in the backdrop of the acute drought that year. The task force had submitted a report recommending division of the project into two – the Peninsular component and the Himalayan component.

The Peninsular component – involving the rivers in southern Indian – envisaged developing a ‘Southern Water Grid’ with 16 linkages. This component included diversion of the surplus waters of the Mahanadi and Godavari to the Pennar, Krishna, Vaigai and Cauvery; the diversion of the west-flowing rivers of Kerala and Karnataka to the east; the inter-linking of small rivers that flow along the west coast, south of Tapi and north of Mumbai; as well as inter-linking of the southern tributaries of the river Yamuna.

The Himalayan component envisaged building storage reservoirs on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra and their main tributaries both in India and Nepal in order to conserve the flow of waters during the monsoons for irrigation and generation of hydro-power, besides checking floods.

The task force appointed by the Vajpayee government had identified 14 links that involved the following: Kosi-Ghagra, Kosi-Mech, Ghagra-Yamuna, Gandak-Ganga, Yamuna-Rajasthan, Rajasthan-Sabarmati, Sarda-Yamuna, Farakka-Sunderbans, Brahmaputra-Ganga, Subernarekha-Mahanadi, and Ganga-Damodar-Subernarekha.

Also, the task force had concluded that the linking of the rivers in the country would raise the irrigation potential to 160 million hectares for all types of crops by 2050, compared to a maximum of about 140 million hectares that could be generated through conventional sources of irrigation.