The Supreme Court on Monday wanted to know about the work done by the Centre on the project for interlinking of rivers and asked the amicus curie to file a short note on it.
A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S H Kapadia, asked advocate Ranjit Kumar, who is assisting the court, to file the report within a week.
Earlier, the apex court had said that it would not favour interlinking of rivers if it causes huge a financial burden on the Centre and asked for a report on its costs.
“My concern is only with what is the financial liability of the project. We want to make it clear that we would not pass order on it if it causes huge financial burden,” the bench had said.
The river interlinking project was the brainchild of the NDA government and in October 2002, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had formed a task force to get the project going against the backdrop of the acute drought that year.
The task force had submitted a report recommending division of the project into two —— the Peninsular component and the Himalayan component.
The Peninsular component —— involving the rivers in southern India —— envisaged developing a ‘Southern Water Grid’ with 16 linkages. This component included diversion of the surplus waters of the Mahanadi and Godavari to the Pennar, Krishna, Vaigai and Cauvery.
The task force had also mooted the diversion of the west-flowing rivers of Kerala and Karnataka to the east, the interlinking of small rivers that flow along the west coast, south of Tapi and north of Mumbai and interlinking of the southern tributaries of the river Yamuna.
The Himalayan component envisaged building storage reservoirs on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra and their main tributaries both in India and Nepal in order to conserve the waters during the monsoon for irrigation and generation of hydro-power, besides checking floods.
