The Hindu : River grid, the preferred solution?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 02, 2002

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River grid, the preferred solution?

By Aniket Alam

HYDERABAD Dec. 1. Endorsed by the President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, the Leader of the Opposition, Sonia Gandhi, the judges of the Supreme Court and the ruling BJP, the national water grid or river linking plan now seems to be the preferred solution for combating recurring droughts in the country.

This plan visualises transfer of 1,500 cubic metres of water per second from the Ganga during the flood season to the Cauvery through a chain of canals linking the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna and the Pennar with these two. A link between the Brahmaputra and the Ganges is also planned to lessen the Brahmaputra floods.

This plan seeks to end the flood problems of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra while at the same time solving the drought in Southern India by diverting the excess waters in these Himalayan rivers to the monsoon-fed peninsular ones.

It requires construction of more than 1000 km of new link canals, 10,000 MW of electricity for lifting water over highlands and over 200 storage reservoirs to enable this water transfer.

M.S. Reddy, former Secretary, the Union Ministry of Water Resources, estimates that it would cost about Rs. 5,00,000 crores, much higher than the Rs. 185,000-crore official estimation.

In a recent lecture to the Institution of Engineers here, he pointed out that lifting 1,500 cubic metres of water per second would not be able to control floods since the normal volume of floods in the Ganga, the Brahmaputra, the Mahanadi and the Godavari range between 30,000 and 60,000 cubic metres of water flow per second.

Even as a drought-proofing measure, the national river linking plan appears costly and politically difficult to operate.

Using the Government data, Dr. Reddy said that a feasible alternative would be proper water use within each river basin which has the potential to irrigate almost all the 140 million hectares of net sown area in the country. At present only 53 million hectares are irrigated.

Much of the 4000 billion cubic metres of rain the country receives, falls in just 100 hours out of the total of 8760 hours in a year. Therefore, the trick is to capture enough water in these 100 hours in the very area where it falls in ways, which would last us for the rest of the parched year.

The late Anil Agarwal of the Centre for Science and Environment had shown, on the basis of data that 10 small dams with a one hectare catchment would store more water than one dam of 10 hectares.

Similar studies show that 100 mm of rainfall on one hectare plot could yield as much as one million litres of water. This indicates that even in low rainfall zones, each village can store enough water to last out drought years. Unfortunately, most of these community-based water conservation structures have been neglected and destroyed over the last few decades. Much of the blame for this lay with skewed Government policies, which preferred cash and cement-intensive mega projects and ignored the potential of village tanks and minor irrigation works.

Equally responsible are rich farmers who discovered that the secret of prosperity lies in the bountiful groundwater pumped out using subsidised electricity to grow water intensive crops for high cash returns.

It is instructive that the recent spat over the Cauvery waters was over the contesting claims of Karnataka farmers who wanted the water for their second sugarcane crop as against farmers in Tamil Nadu who had been growing three crops of paddy.

Similarly, in the dry zones of Telangana in Andhra Pradesh, rich farmers pump groundwater to fill their paddy fields with over six inches of water even in May to raise their third crop of paddy.

This is in an area where paddy was never grown.

Promethean schemes like national river links appeal to such water-hungry farmers and policy makers who favour technological fixes for socio-economic problems.

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