INDIA: Droughts and Floods Revive Discredited River Plan

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 28 2004 (IPS) - Severe droughts in the western half of the Indian sub-continent coupled with devastating floods that have claimed close to a thousand lives in the eastern region, including Bangladesh, seem to have given new life to India’s discredited river- linking project.

On a tour of flood-hit eastern Bihar state last week, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee saw an opportunity to voice support for the ambitious project which has been put on the backburner after his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost power in the recent elections held between April and May.

The mega project estimated to cost 120 billion U.S. dollars was to have put a final end to the country’s ‘permanent paradox of floods and droughts’ but fell afoul of smaller neighbours like Nepal and Bangladesh while several Indian states have openly opposed it.

No less than 30 rivers were to be involved in the project among them the Ganges and the Brahmaputra – the two rivers responsible for the current spate of flooding which has claimed more than a thousand lives in Bangladesh and in the neighbouring Indian states of Bihar, Assam and West Bengal.

Meanwhile, the seasonal monsoon rains have been playing truant over large parts of north-western India with officials fearing for crops in the key farming states of Punjab and Haryana while western Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra and southern Andhra Pradesh are seriously water-logged.

While Vajpayee and the BJP are no longer in power, large sections of the Indian bureaucracy are known to be working hard to keep the river-linking project alive.

Late May, scientists from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) located in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state which is ruled by a BJP provincial government warned in a study that unless the river- linking project was implemented the country could soon face serious water shortages.

Scientists, S.K.Gupta and R.D. Deshpande claimed in their study that inter-basin transfer of water as proposed by the Vajpayee government could generate 174 cubic kilometers of badly needed water annually.

But the project continues to be opposed by other well-known experts among them Ramaswamy Iyer, a former secretary in India’s Ministry of Water Resources. ”What we do about the occurrence of floods in one area and the scarcity of water in drought-prone areas are entirely separate questions that can be coped with only with area-specific methods,” Iyer told IPS adding that he saw neither paradox nor irony in the phenomenon.

According to Iyer the only way to tackle floods such as in Bihar was to regulate human settlement and activity in the flood plains rather than try to build dams and embankments as has been the practice since British colonial days.

Indeed, floods in Bihar, an annual feature, is usually the result of sudden breaches in earthen embankments built along the rivers as flood control measures.

Iyer is even more skeptical about long-distance transfers since ”significant moderation of floods will call for massive diversion of waters which may be technically unfeasible or have serious consequences for the river regime downstream of the diversion point, along the diversion route and in recipient areas.”

Worse criticism has come from non-government organizations (NGOs) that have opposed dams and mega-projects instead of small locally-manageable solutions such as the use of simple check-dams and water-harvesting to tackle India’s hydrological problems.

In the face of such opposition, India’s new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shown far less enthusiasm than Vajpayee for the river-linking project and called for detailed techno-economic studies before finally committing himself one way or another.

At the moment, Singh is troubled by serious inter-state water- sharing disputes such as that between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the south over the waters of the river Cauvery and the unilateral termination this month of earlier agreements by northern Punjab to share the waters of the Sutlej river with adjoining Haryana state.

At the international level Bangladesh has made it clear that it was against any unilateral plan by India to use artificial canals to divert waters from the Brahmaputra which originates in Tibet and has proposed an integrated water resources management plan that includes all co-riparian countries including China, Bhutan and Nepal.

Sudhirendra Sharma, a former water expert with the World Bank and currently attached to the Delhi-based Ecological Foundation sees merit in Dhaka’s demand for a regional approach to managing the sub-continent’s water resources especially after this month’s floods that has affected Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh.

”So far India has for reasons of regional diplomacy preferred to deal with each of its neighbours bilaterally but this approach is completely inadequate considering the complexity of the ecosystem in the Ganges-Brahmputra basin,” Sharma told IPS.

Indeed, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has urged Singh to take up the question of joint water management with China and Bhutan.

Gogoi believes that the devastation in his state was the direct result of a building of a reservoir in Bhutan that caused river silting, resulting in the Ganges and Brahmputra overflowing. The Assam chief minister also blamed deforestation and topsoil erosion in China and Burma.

As for the river-linking project Sharma warns that Singh may not be able to resist for long the powerful water-bureaucracy in the country which seems to be lying low for the moment and waiting for opportunities such as the present round of simultaneous droughts and floods to exacerbate – before pressing their case.

”There is no dearth of engineers who will list the virtues of mega- projects, economists who will extol their supposed benefits to the poor and project-savvy bureaucrats waiting to favour contractors and themselves with readily available loans,” Sharma said.