The Hindu : 'Interlinking of rivers impractical'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 02, 2003

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National

'Interlinking of rivers impractical'

By Gargi Parsai

Sewagram April 1. The National Water Convention held here to discuss privatisation of water and interlinking of rivers today rejected the Centre's National Water Policy and consigned it to the flames at a public meeting in Wardha. The policy was adopted a year ago, on this day, at a meeting of the Chief Ministers chaired by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, in New Delhi.

The meeting called for abandoning the scheme for inter-linking rivers saying it was "impractical'' and will "break society'' besides causing untold displacement of people and damage to environment and ecology.

The two-day convention warned against attempts to take away the sovereign right of people over water and gave examples of how the new policy was playing havoc with the country's natural resource. "An MNC, Suez Degremont, was privatising Ganga water and denying farmers irrigation water. Vivendi was privatising rivers Subarnarekha and Kharar in Jamshedpur, while Coca Cola's privatisation bid in Kerala was denying people access to safe drinking water. The privatisation of the Orissa Lift Irrigation Corporation had raised the price of irrigation water almost 10 times, while the Sheonath had been sold to a private party in Chattisgarh,'' the meet said.

"From the abode of Mahatma Gandhi at Sewagram here, we reject outright the policy that calls for privatisation of water and makes a proprietal claim over water, which is a natural resource and belongs to the people... '' said Rajendra Singh of Jal Biradari while addressing a gathering of Gandhians, NGOs, students and water experts, along with co-hosts, the Sewagram Ashram and the Magan Sangrahlaya Samiti, both closely associated with Gandhi.

Mr. Rajendra Singh, the "Water man'' from Rajasthan, who is leading a rally through 11 States of like-minded NGOs against privatisation of water, warned against a "water mafia'' in the form of multi-national companies, the World Bank and advanced developed countries. "The East India Company took several years to enslave the country, but these MNCs and influential companies, if allowed to go unchecked, will make India a slave in five years,'' he warned.

Recounting the "selling'' of the Sheonath, he said more and more information was emerging of the surreptitious deals in giving away rivers under contracts to private ownership. "The privatisation of Kelo, Savri, Manda and Karun rivers in the erstwhile Madhya Pradesh and present

Chattisgarh is a glaring example of how far our politicians are going. Even in Orissa there are reports about giving three or four rivers to private parties.''

According to him, the seeds for privatisation and inter-linking of rivers were sown in the National Water Policy, to which Jal Biradari had objected even when it was in the making. While the objections were accepted in a public forum, they were not included in the policy. "No Chief Minister has said that he/she has surplus waters and is willing to share with other States. The inter-linking scheme is dubious because the studies done by the Water Resources Ministry are 30 to 40 years old since when the profile of rivers and the population around them has changed.''

Mr. Singh believes that nature has provided water to a particular agro-ecological climatic zone as per the requirement. For him, the argument that a continual drought would affect small watershed projects does not hold.

He has shown, by reviving several rivers and wells by water harvesting in Rajasthan, how the rivers remained perennial with "recharge and less delivery''. The motto of Jal Biradari is to motivate people to go in for revival of dried ponds, rivulets, wells in their villages and mould the cropping pattern to meet "need, not greed.''

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