The river inter-linking project (ILR) is said to be a gold mine waiting to be tapped. According to an ICRA study, business opportunities worth R2.6 lakh crore are expected to open up for engineering, procurement and construction entities’ (EPC) players by 2034-35 for the completion of four priority ILR projects. About one-third of these (Rs80,000 crore) is estimated to be awarded in the next four years for companies involved in the construction of large irrigation projects. However, there is wide-ranging opposition to the project.
Scientists and water policy experts have, for long, expressed doubts about the scheme’s scientific footing. They worry that the government hasn’t adequately accounted for the potential unintended consequences of moving such a large amount of water.
New research even suggests the river interlinking project threatens to affect India’s seasonal monsoon. A quarter of the rain India receives during the annual monsoon comes from the so-called recycled precipitation -- water that evaporates from the land in one place and falls somewhere else as rain. Diverting large amounts of water could interfere with that natural process.
In short, critics have characterised the initiative as an unprecedented intervention in natural systems and cautioned that such projects could adversely impact agricultural productivity and disrupt monsoon patterns. They have demanded its comprehensive review. That the project will generate big bucks has become another lightning rod for controversy.
Unfazed by the opposition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently flagged off work on the Rs44,605 crore Ken-Betwa river interlinking project. The government has ignored critical comments from experts, including members of an empowered committee appointed by the Supreme Court, and even bypassed due process in approving the project. For instance, when the Union cabinet approved the project in 2021 before the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, the National Green Tribunal was still deliberating a challenge to its green clearance.
No evidence of scrutiny
The project will draw supposedly ‘excess’ water away from the Ken river basin towards the Betwa river basin and thereon to farmland and human settlements of Bundelkhand, one of the country’s most drought-affected areas. Critics point out that the law has strict terms for allowing hydro-electric power projects in ecologically sensitive areas – the Daudhan Dam will be erected inside the Panna Tiger Reserve – but there is little evidence of such scrutiny. Work on the dam will destroy lakhs of trees and destabilise fragile ecosystems. To make matters worse, the government has refused to release hydrological data of the basins claiming they are sensitive by virtue of being subsets of the international Ganga basin.
That a river interlink will water fields and quench thirst is irrefutable. But, as critics ask, for how long? Various studies have shown that the Ken and the Betwa basins suffer floods and droughts together, that the sub-continent’s rainfall and sedimentation patterns stand to be altered and that the Betwa basin can be replenished more affordably by maintaining environmental flows and bolstering natural storage.
The government’s principal claim is that the Ken and the Betwa basins are respectively water-surplus and water-deficient. This is a disingenuous claim as the Betwa basin is water-deficient strictly because it hosts several lakh hectares of irrigated cropland. Should the demand in the Ken basin increase, both areas will suffer.
Experts have alleged that the project is a ploy to pacify the electorate in Bundelkhand – as its approval months ahead of last state polls in UP also suggested – and/or to improve water supply to reservoirs in the lower Betwa, thanks to other upstream blockades. The project thus seems more the product of political expediency and self-image than current ecological sense. The more resources the government sinks into it, the more unlikely changing or reversing course will become in the face of adverse developments. When they come to pass, the responsibility and costs of mitigating the adverse consequences of this and other projects, including the recently launched Parbati-Kalisindh-Chambal link, will fall to the people.
Apart from Ken Betwa, the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) has identified three other priority projects, namely Kosi-Mechi, Parabati Kalisindh Chambal and Godavari-Cauvery links, for early implementation. ICRA estimates these priority links to be completed at a cost of Rs2.6 lakh crore by 2034-35. The Godavari-Cauvery project is the largest of the four (at 45 per cent of the cumulative project cost) and the Kosi-Mechi link is the smallest at 4 per cent. The first awarded ILR project (accounting for 21 per cent of the cost for priority links), the Ken Betwa, is already under implementation.