Inter Basin Water Transfer Link Project of India

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Interview
Sockalingam 'Sam' Kannappan,

Conflict over India's river plan

An Indian plan to build the largest man-made water network in the world is ill-conceived and could spark a water war with its neighbours. The warning comes as the government prepares to seek funds from the World Bank for the multi-billion dollar project.

Last December, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee announced he was making water a top priority. By linking India's largest rivers in a countrywide grid he will get water from the north to the
states of the south and east that were hit by severe droughts last year.

The plan will redraw the hydrological map of India, taking flood waters from 14 Himalayan tributaries of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers in northern India and Nepal and transferring them south via a series of canals and pumping stations, across the Vindhya mountains to replenish 17 southern rivers, including the Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery. Up to 1500 cubic metres of water a second will be pumped south.

In all, the scheme will mean building around 300 reservoirs and digging more than 1000 kilometres of canals. According to retired military engineer, Sudhir Vombatkere, who is now with the Mysore
Consumer Action Forum, the project will flood an estimated 8000 square kilometres of land. This could leave 3 million people homeless.

As the largest single project of its kind attempted anywhere in the world, the project will not come cheap, costing anywhere between $70 billion and $200 billion. Indian engineers in the US, headed by
Texan power engineer Sam Kannappan are lobbying President Bush to persuade the World Bank to back the scheme, which they hope will be completed in 14 years.

Despite the support of all of India's major political parties, opposition to the scheme is growing. In February, Ramaswamy Iyer, who used to head India's Ministry of Water Resources in the 1980s
dismissed the project as "technological hubris". He says India already has half-complete water projects worth billions of dollars that should be finished before moving on to another one.

But there are more serious objections. Iyer warns that the scheme risks major confrontation with Bangladesh, which gets much of its water from the Ganges and Brahmaputra after the rivers leave India.
The two countries have been at loggerheads over water since 1974, when India completed the Farakka barrage in the Ganges close to the border, diverting crucial dry-season flows into Indian irrigation
canals. Bangladesh blames the barrage for dried-up fields, disease and the salt poisoning of the vast Sundarban mangrove swamps in the Ganges delta.

So far, the Bangladeshi government has not commented on the new plans, but under a 1996 Ganges treaty between the two countries, India vowed not to reduce flows over the border any further. Now it
is planning to do precisely that, says Iyer. "Bangladesh will want first call on any water stored during the flood season on the Ganges," he says.

India's National Water Development Agency in New Delhi, which is backing the scheme, says there will be enough water to irrigate some 35 million hectares of farmland and produce 34,000 megawatts of
hydroelectricity, although as much as a third of this could be needed for pumping water.

Iyer and his successor as India's water boss, M. S. Reddy, both argue that better use of existing water supplies is the answer. They want renewed efforts to "harvest" local rainwater by storing it in the tens of thousands of silted-up ancient reservoirs, or tanka, that the government has abandoned. Sanjoy Dasgupta, a senior irrigation engineer in Karnataka in southern India agrees.

"Three-quarters of India's monsoon rains go into the sea," he says.

"The answer is to harvest our rainfall better."

Even engineers in states that stand to benefit most from the scheme are sceptical. The driest states, such as Karnataka, also tend to be the highest- often more than 600 metres above sea level- and they
doubt the water from the north will ever reach them.

Environmentalists also attacked the plan, claiming it will spread pollution from rivers like the Ganges to cleaner rivers.

Interlinking a polluted river with a non-polluted one "will have a devastating effect on all our rivers", says Ravi Agarwal of the New Delhi green group Srishti.

Wild Life News
Fred Pearce
arch 1st 2003

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