In striking contrast to this grass-roots approach, the national government is putting in place an ambitious plan to link India’s major river systems with 30 canals stretching 10,000 kilometers. The idea is to move water from flood-prone areas, such as Bihar and West Bengal in the northeast, to drought-stricken regions like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the south. The government isn’t releasing details until June, but some blueprints have already been drawn up. The plan is to link 14 flood-prone Himalayan rivers by canals and storage reservoirs. This northern web would be joined to 17 rivers in the south–which suffer shortages–centered on the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri rivers. The project, which would call for no fewer than 37 huge dams, would dwarf China’s Three Gorges Dam and its more recent plan to link the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. It would redirect 173 billion cubic meters a year–a quarter the flow of the mighty Brahmaputra.
Some of that water will irrigate crops, boosting yearly agricultural output by 4 percent. If those forecasts are correct, that would go a long way toward boosting India’s annual grain production from 200 billion tons to 450 billion tons by 2050, which experts says is essential if India is to feed its mushrooming population. New hydro-power plants would add a third to India’s electricity-generating capacity.
The real impetus to the project, though, is drought. Lately, farmers have been pressuring politicians to act. Late last year, India’s Supreme Court instructed legislators to press ahead, and the prime minister ordered the $120 billion program to be completed in 14 years. “The government show of eagerness and haste is a good thing,” says Anil Mohile, former chairman of India’s Central Water Commission. “There’ll be a really serious move to get this done.”
If the project works, it will be a break from the past. A 1972 proposal for a national water grid linking the Ganges and Kaveri basins foundered because it took so much electricity to lift water from one watershed to another. The latest proposal follows more closely the contours of India’s topography: the highest elevation any canal must lift water is 120 meters. The National Water Development Agency has honed the plan for 20 years, though it has studied only six of the 30 proposed links.
Engineering may be easy compared with politics. Court battles, riots and strikes already rage over water sharing. Multiply that by 30 links and you begin to get the picture. Siphoning water from Himalayan sources would upset fragile agreements with Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. And what about the millions of people who’ll have to give up their homes to make way for dams and canals? The NGOs that tied up Madhya Pradesh’s Narmada Dam in endless court cases over two decades will relish the fight. Then there’s the immense social cost, which will only generate more trouble for politicians. And who’s going to pay? The government hasn’t said. “It’s an insane and dangerous idea,” says Ramaswamy Iyer, the Indian government’s former secretary of Water Resources. Greens fear it would alter the whole country’s topography in ways that can’t be anticipated. No studies have been done on the ecological impact of the scheme.
If the big project won’t solve India’s water woes, neither will small ones, says India’s Water Resources Ministry. Promoting “water harvesting”–as the low-level schemes are called– might help for a while, but they won’t cope with the demand from India’s mushrooming population. That’s going to require solutions both big and small.
