Modi's Rivers Linking Project Cannot Work

In order to fight against drought and to be prepared to meet the country's future needs, Modi's government launches this mammoth project that attempts to link water streams between them. Benefits are questionable.

Deep inside India's most celebrated big cat haven-the Panna Tiger Reserve-a red line, freshly painted over the khaki outcrops of ancient Vindhyan sandstone, marks the alignment of the proposed 77-metre-high, 2.03 km-long Dhaudan dam on Madhya Pradesh's Ken river. It will be the first of some 3,000 big dams and storage structures that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government wants to build as part of a grand plan to interlink and redesign the natural flow of 37 major rivers. The aim is to end water scarcity, while booting up for the country's future water needs.
It's an audacious, some say "hubristic", venture. Touted as the world's largest irrigation infrastructure project, the Interlinking of Rivers (ILR) programme proposes 30 river links. ILR will see the excavation of 15,000 km of new canals to relocate 174 cubic km of water-enough to annually supply over 100 mega-metropolises the size of Delhi or Mumbai. The National Water Development Agency (NWDA), which has designed the projects-14 for Himalayan rivers and 16 in peninsular India-as part of the National Perspective Plan (NPP) for Water Resources Development since 1982 is already listing the "benefits".
Ultimate idea
NWDA director-general S. Masood Hussain, 56, who has over three decades' experience in designing mega dam projects, including the Indira (Narmada) Sagar, says the ILR will double India's current 42,200 megawatt hydropower generation (from medium and major projects), adding 34 additional gigawatts to the capacity. Also designed to irrigate 35 million monsoon-dependent hectares, Masood says ILR is the only realistic means to raise the country's irrigation potential from 140 million to 175 million hectares by 2050, when the population is projected to touch 1.6 billion.

Many states have opposed the ILR programme questioning the NWDA's water balance assessments. Odisha turned down a proposal on the ambitious Mahanadi-Godavari link project days after a central team briefed CM Naveen Patnaik in June 2015. Responding to concerns over extensive submergence from the big dam at Manibhadra, the Navalawala task force is drafting alternative strategies. The Mahanadi-Godavari link is critical to the construction of eight other downstream river links.

In March 2012, Centre for Science & Environment director-general Sunita Narain said, "The idea of interlinking rivers is appealing as it is so grand. But this is also why it is nothing more than a distraction that will take away from the business at hand-to provide clean drinking water to all." So is that what it is, just a grand distraction?