Highest priority for water conservation: Gadkari

The government will give the highest priority to conservation of water by creating check dams across the country, Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari said here Friday.

The availability of water through conservation mode will enhance the farm productivity by three times, besides providing employment to young people and fight the menace of poverty, Gadkari said, inaugurating a two-day national workshop on regeneration of rivers here.

The minister underlined the need for small projects mainly on the wasteland by extensive use of technology, and added that big dams not only entail capital cost but are also mired in a number of problems like land acquisition, displacement and time-bound completion.

Delays in execution of water projects and corruption will not be tolerated and there will be e-tendering for work order and satellite based monitoring apart from auditing and socio-economic impact assessment, he said.

Favouring an integrated approach by combining ethics, economy and ecology, Gadkari said that availability of water is a must for overall development of the villages.

He lamented over the fact that even after 65 years of independence, most of the villages in India have either no water or polluted water.