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Against the Tide
WEAK LINKS IN RIVERS' NETWORK PLAN
By Darryl D'Monte
Some ill-conceived projects take a long time to die a natural death if they ever do. The proposal to link northern and southern rivers is one such. It was first mooted by Dr K L Rao, when he was irrigation minister in Nehru's cabinet, and taken up by Dastur, the engineering company, in the 1970s.
Now the Supreme Court has directed the Centre to consider linking all major rivers within 10 years and the prime minister is to announce this shortly. In court, the government replied it could link peninsular rivers by 2035 and Himalayan rivers by 2043, after which, presumably, the two networks could be integrated.
The scheme may appear the answer to the country's droughts and floods, since rivers in the north and east tend to suffer from excess during the monsoon. Southern rivers, being dependent only on the rains, which can fail - as they have this year - are almost always deficient. By draining the rivers in the upper reaches of the country, both their problems and those of their southern countrymen can be solved at one go.
With the fierce controversy between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over sharing Cauvery water, the link scheme, renamed the Garland canal project by Dastur, has got a fresh lease. It has sometimes been abbreviated to the Ganga-Cauvery link and southern politicians have been lamenting the delay in taking up the project. They cite the Ninth Plan document which notes that while the average Indian has access to 2,214 cubic metres of water, it is as high as 18,470 cubic metres in the Brahmaputra basin and a niggardly 383 cubic metres in the basins of some east- flowing rivers in the peninsula.
The BJP national executive reaffirmed its commitment to the scheme in 2000, which was the provocation for a writ petition against the Central government by some politicians from the south. The Supreme Court has made its recent ruling in a public interest litigation and was not impressed by the earlier argument by attorney general Soli Sorabjee that the scheme would cost Rs 70,000 crore. It pointed out that the Centre had been writing off thousands of crores of loans as non-performing assets.
The government has since clarified that it will cost Rs 560,000 crore. The cost alone is prohibitive. However, if the benefits were not in doubt, there could well be a case for going ahead with a feasibility study on the ground that not doing anything to curtail droughts and floods takes a very heavy economic toll, and one which mounts by the year.
But there are several other economic and environmental reasons for not proceeding with the project. The most important of these pertains to the difficulty of lifting water from the north up to the Deccan. This will entail enormous amounts of energy much of which has to be produced by hydropower to begin with and renders the scheme infructuous from the start.
It has been suggested that a Central authority should construct huge reservoirs on the Ganga and Brahmaputra and link these two mighty rivers with canals, thereby diverting surplus waters south-eastwards into the Mahanadi. Any scheme that smacks of gigantomania of this kind ought to be questioned. It is not as if rivers, in the course of their flow, play no ecological role other than supplying water to parched regions. They carry silt which replenishes the topsoil and enables agriculture to flourish.
Once you create reservoirs and virtually a country-wide network of canals, this will play havoc with this ecological role. It will impoverish river valleys and the prosperity these sustained, displace local communities and, as one sees in Punjab and Haryana, lead to waterlogging and salinity in the absence of proper drainage that rivers provide. Not least, a Garland canal system will fragment wildlife habitats: Animals require corridors to connect them to far-flung forests, and these will be severed.
As it happens, the scheme has some notorious predecessors, particularly the ill-fated attempts by the Soviet Union to divert Siberian rivers through a major canal network to feed the deficient rivers in Kazakhastan and the Central Asian republics. The central feature was a 2,200-km-long canal, linking Siberian rivers, swollen with snowmelt, to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in Central Asia. These rivers themselves were diverted in 1918 to grow cotton or white gold in the early years of the Soviet regime, thereby rendering the Aral sea, Asia's second biggest lake, an ecological disaster.
In the 1970s and 1980s, agronomists argued that the diversion of Siberian rivers would not only make the Soviet Union self-sufficient in grain but a major exporter. However, once perestroika began in the mid-1980s, sense prevailed and the scheme was abandoned for ecological reasons.
The answer, at least to meeting basic needs for drinking water and minimal irrigation, lies in relying on smaller water-harvesting schemes where communities call the shots, rather than irrigation engineers who seek to create a massive water grid, on the lines of the electricity system. Fortunately, there is a rich tradition of such water-harnessing schemes through the length and breadth of this country, many of which are coming back into use with the failure of centralised provision of water through dams and canals.
Courtesy http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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