Waterways are not pipelines: Why inter-linking rivers is a recipe for disaster

By DINESH C SHARMA
You would be shocked if someone told you that the apex court has recently directed the central government to redefine the geography of India. This made no 'breaking news' on television but this is exactly what the court has directed.Yet this is the precise implication of the court directive asking the centre to implement the project to inter-link Indian rivers - the grandiose plan which had been lying in cold storage for many years.

In both its original shape when it was conceived several decades ago and in its resurrected form during the NDA regime, the project starts with a map of India with rivers marked in blue, decides that all the rivers need to be linked, and then talks of modalities of joining all the blue lines with a red pen.Once all the rivers are linked up as part of this grand design, then the map of India would certainly look different and we will have to change Indian maps in all our geography text books. It is this plan of re-engineering India's geography that the court has put its seal on and wants the government to implement because, in its opinion, it is in 'national interest'.

The ecological, economic and social costs of interlinking rivers are going to be enormous. All these concerns were articulated during the public debate that took place when the NDA government wanted to push this project as a 'nationalist' dream a decade ago.The interlinking would involve about 30 large projects and construction of 80 dams all over the country. Just imagine the ecological devastation it would cause in different parts of the country.

There is no estimation as yet of how much it would cost, but one can say it certainly has all ingredients of giving rise to a million scams.All this apart, the project goes against basic tenets of sustainable development as it solely focuses on traditional approach of supply-side response to a projected or imagined demand. A group of concerned experts and individuals have appealed to the court to reconsider its judgment. They argue that the idea of transferring flood waters to arid or drought-prone areas is flawed because there will be hardly any flood-moderation and the project would not benefit drylands in any case. Arguing that water from 'surplus' basins needs to be transferred to 'deficit' ones is unscientific. When you say a river is 'surplus' you are ignoring multiple purposes that it serves as it flows through different regions before joining the sea. (dailymail.co.uk)