Which Way Should Water-Planning Go After Godavari-Krishna Link?

After Godavari-Krishna link, India needs to look at several such projects to address issues posed by water scarcity.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu at a ceremony to mark the interlinking of Godavari and Krishna rivers, September 16, 2015. (Photo: @ncbn)

Inter-Linking: Solution to Water Crisis

• Andhra Pradesh government creates history by Godavari-Krishna link, with at least 80,000 TMC feet of water now being diverted by the state government
• Most of the river-linking projects in India including the Brahmaputra-Ganga gravity link canal and the Ganga-Cauvery link have run into controversies
• The Supreme Court has also been approached with the assumption that India’s water crisis can be solved through interlinking
• Proper communication between the states needed as is shown in case of Odisha’s U-turn on diversion of water from the Hirakud reservoir
• Interlinking of rivers, least understood plan with very little knowledge about its long-term implications

The Andhra Pradesh government seemed to be on top of the world when it accomplished a historic act of linking two major rivers, the Godavari and the Krishna. After about five decades of struggle, it is claimed, it has now been able to bring water security to lakhs of farmers and others. The state government has claimed that it has succeeded in diverting at least 80,000 thousand million cubic (TMC) feet of water as part of its plan to conserve 3,000 TMC feet of Godavari water that is otherwise draining into the Bay of Bengal annually.  

This linking and the much-claimed benefits would certainly help the controversial Interlinking of Rivers (ILR) plan gain new momentum and support. The gigantic ILR plan has been one of the pet ideas of the NDA government, to curb most of India’s water woes yet whose details are the least known. Going by the speed of our assessments of projects, India will take about 50 more years to even understand what socio-economic and ecological impacts this newly opened link will have. However, it calls for a fresh debate on the ILR plans.

Grand Ideas

An old idea, perhaps first promulgated in the 19th century by Arthur Cotton, was the plan to link southern Indian rivers for inland navigation. In fact, the idea was implemented to some extent but had to be abandoned for several reasons, including the problem of decay of the canals. The imagination has stayed since and then moved on to a giant idea of ‘Garland Canal’ mooted by Captain Dinshaw J Dastur, a pilot by profession.

Water managers have always been obsessed with grand ideas but Dastur’s entry into the water arena was not acceptable even then. Other knowledgeable people were already apprehensive. Nevertheless, the grand imaginations persisted. For the common people, the very idea of ‘transferring from surplus to deficit basins’ has always been an attractive proposition. Inter-basin transfers have also been referred to as ILR by many planners.

(Source: National Water Development Agency)

Controversial Proposals

There have been many attempts to propose giant links but all of them have run into controversies. The two big ones are: The Brahmaputra-Ganga gravity link canal, taking off from Jogighopa in India, but passing through Bangladesh and the 2,640 km-long Ganga-Cauvery link proposal by Dr K L Rao, which was to take off near Patna, pass through the Sone, Narmada, Tapi, Godavari, Krishna and Pennar basins and then join rivers, before joining with the Cauvery upstream of the Grand Anicut. Both of them landed into controversies for several reasons that included problems with technological and economic viability, international implications and so on.

Successive governments have established committees and then slowed down on ILR plans. The Supreme Court has also been moved and judicial interventions have sometimes become more proactive to promote ILR perhaps with the same common understanding that India’s water crisis can be solved to a large extent by transferring water from where it is plenty to parched regions. 

(Photo: Reuters)

However, on most occasions the planners as well as the judiciary have overlooked the many real issues. The time taken, the construction required that would destroy India’s shrinking ecology, dams and their related woes, controversies surrounding benefit-sharing are among some of the vexed issues. Most importantly, there has been no attempt so far to study the ILR plans’ ecological impacts on the river basins.

Water Deficit Basins

Even technical plans are not available. Basins that have been traditionally touted as surplus have already turned into deficit ones and statistics in many cases are obsolete. Recently, the Odisha government’s stated opposition to the revival of the Mahanadi-Godavari link is an indicator of that. In fact, Odisha also made a U-turn on its promise of diversion of water from the Hirakud reservoir to Chhattisgarh owing to projected scarcity of water in the basin in the near future. This in a basin which is ‘surplus’ as per statistics.

(Photo courtesy: @ncbn)

Interlinking of rivers is a much-talked-about but least understood plan that resurfaces each time a controversy pops up around water resources. No one is quite clear what long-term implications such plans hold for the entire nation and the local ecologies. We may recall veteran Professor Ramaswamy Iyer who once said that “Quite apart from the technical challenges involved, this implies the redrawing of the geography of the country.”

“One’s misgivings about that kind of technological hubris or Prometheanism (“the conquest of nature” philosophy) may be dismissed by some as romantic, but the practical difficulties involved cannot be so dismissed” 

— Professor Ramaswamy Iyer

There may be a few cases where short gravity link may still be feasible. However, the idea of interlinking rivers will certainly bring more dangers than solve our water woes. Intra-basin interventions are the need of the time.

(The author is a water and climate change researcher)