Too costly, so India scraps rivers inter-linking project

New Delhi—Quoting huge cost factor, the Indian government has scrapped the ambitious project to inter-link major rivers, which was seen as a means to control frequent floods and droughts that ravage the country in different parts the country each year.

Federal Water Resources Minister P K Bansal told parliament that inter-linking Himalayan rivers with peninsular rivers that flow in the southern part of the country would require Indian Rupees 4,400 billion (USD $ 95,176 million), which was “beyond the capacity of the federal government”.

“Inter-linking Himalayan rivers with peninsular rivers is a huge task. It involves a massive expenditure of Rupees 4,400 billion and such kind of money is not available to us,” Bansal told lawmakers Wednesday.

But peninsular and Himalayan rivers would be linked separately, the minister said, though the projects would have a long gestation period.

Bansal said five projects of inter-linking peninsular rivers were on the government's priority list. It was “pursuing it in the right earnest after taking consent of the concerned state governments and environmental and rehabilitation issues”.

“At present only 5 of the 14 projects of inter-linking peninsular rivers are on the government's priority list. It will involve expenditure of USD $ 7 million and would take around 9-10 years for completion,”

Bansal's remark comes shortly after his cabinet colleague Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh had said that the idea of inter-linking India's rivers was a “disaster”.

“The interlinking of rivers will be a human-ecological-economic disaster. It is easy to do interlinking on paper. Interlinking of rivers has limited basin value, but large-scale interlinking would be a disaster,” Ramesh said.

India re-started the idea of inter-linking the Himalayan rivers with river waterways that flow in downstream peninsular India seriously after the country's Supreme Court had mandated the government in October 2002 to start work on inter-linking of major rivers in the country to provide water for irrigation and other uses in the southern parts of the country.

Many environmental experts have over the years had voiced their concern of the viability of the project mainly over issues that may arise in areas like health. with more vectors emerging, social and ecological inputs relating to population transfer and wildlife displacements, pollution causes due to low-water levels during the summer months and climate change with reports of increasing melting of snow in the Himalayas.

The initial cost was projected at between USD125-200 billion and later revised to USD600-800 billion over the years with cost overruns.

Also there is an international and regional angle. Although the inter-ling of river waters is seen as a domestic linkage, the waters, especially those like the River Ganges and Brahmaputra has an international angle for their basin areas are shared by China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh.

The Nepalese link is that it supplies almost half of the annual flow of the River Ganges. China is planning to build a series of dams and reservoirs in its area to water its parched northern areas before the river waters reach India. Nearly 90 per cent of Bangladesh water needs are met through its flow from India.

The inter-linking of rivers was first mooted by a British engineer Sir Arthur Cotton during the time the Indian sub-continent was ruled by the British colonial rulers. Sir Arthur envisaged the project mainly as a navigation tool for trade in southern India.

The idea was revived in 1972 by Dr. K.L. Rao, who was irrigation minister in prime minister Indira Gandhi's cabinet. He envisaged connecting River Ganges in the north with River Cauvery in the south.

In 1997, another engineer Captain Dinshaw Dastur proposed a grand Garland Canal consisting of two canals. The first was the 4,200-km long, 300 m wide Himalayan canal and second a 9,300-km long Garland Canal aligned to the southern slopes of the Himalayas, bound by River Ravi in the west and connected to the mighty River Brahmaputra in the east.