Too grandiose a plan

River interlinking can only work on a small scale

The proposal to connect India's rivers backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, in his agenda for governance needs to be weighed with more care. On paper, this grandiose plan has the potential to mitigate floods and droughts through equitable distribution of available water; extend irrigation to arid areas; meet growing household and industrial demand for water; generate hydropower; and create new waterways for navigation. But it poses grave ecological, geological and geographical risks due to the submergence of vast tracks of scarce land and biodiversity-rich forests and by its proposed alteration of gravity- and gradient-driven water flows through the massive transfer of water from one river basin to another. Worse still, it would necessitate the displacement of many people, thereby creating resettlement- and rehabilitation-related problems.

The concept of river networking is not new. Mooted originally in the 19th century by British water engineers, this idea has been shelved and resurrected time and again. The two most notable river-connecting plans that attracted serious attention were those conceived by K L Rao in the early 1970s and Captain Dastur later in the same decade. Dr Rao's plan - wholly impractical and prohibitively costly - involved construction of a 2,640-kilometre canal linking the Ganga with the Cauvery. Captain Dastur's proposal was even more ambitious; it envisaged two lengthy canals - one, a lateral canal along the Himalayas to join the Ravi with the Brahmaputra; and the other, a garland-shaped canal girdling peninsular India. Predictably, none of these proposals could make much headway till the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government split them into 30 stand-alone river links whose implementation would have cost a whopping Rs 5.6 lakh crore at 2002 prices. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this extravagant proposal also went off the radar till the Supreme Court intervened to revitalise it in February 2012 by appointing a committee to oversee its planning and implementation. The reality, however, is that only nine of the envisaged 30 links are deemed implementable. Detailed project reports are ready only for three of them, including the Ken-Betwa link project in Madhya Pradesh, which is in the advanced stages of getting the Union Cabinet's nod.

Going by past experience, it seems only small river-joining projects that can be carried out in single states or a couple of adjoining states, which are ready to co-operate because of mutual benefits, are practically feasible. Most of the links that have been successfully implemented in the past, such as Beas-Sutlej, Sarda-Sahayak, Kurnool-Cudappah, Periyar Vegai and Telugu Ganga, fall into this category. Any bid to impose projects on unwilling states is bound to fail, since water is a state subject. The Sutlej-Yamuna link canal project is a case in point. Punjab is allowing the Sutlej's water to flow down to Pakistan rather than sharing it with Haryana by completing the part of the link canal passing through its territory. Mr Modi would, therefore, do well to keep these aspects in mind while advocating fanciful ideas like the networking of Indian rivers.