What experts say

Published : Apr 20, 2012 00:00 IST

The Supreme Court's judgment of February 27 on the river-linking project has raised various concerns in different quarters. In a statement released on March 29, a group of concerned citizens has urged the court to put the judgment on hold and undertake a reconsideration of the entire matter. The 62 signatories to the statement include Ramaswamy R. Iyer, former Secretary, Water Resources; Prashant Bhushan, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court; Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, Delhi; Prof. A. Vaidyanthan, former Member, Planning Commission; Arun Kumar, Professor, JNU, Delhi; Ashis Nandy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies; Darryl D'Monte and Kuldip Nayar, senior journalists; Prof. S. Janakarajan, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai; and Sanjoy Hazarika of the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Guwahati.

The following is a statement of the case they make against the project:

(i) Instead of starting from the identification of the needs of water-scarce areas and finding area-specific answers, the project starts by looking at a map of India, decides a priori that the rivers of India can and should be linked, and then proceeds to consider the modalities of doing so. This is a reckless and major redesigning of the geography of the country.

(ii) The related ideas of a national water grid or the networking of rivers give evidence of profoundly wrong thinking about rivers. Rivers are not pipelines.

(iii) The grand design consisting of 30 projects involving upwards of 80 dams is bound to have major environmental/ecological consequences, which might even be disastrous in some cases. Each dam will also mean the displacement of people to varying extents, and may cause injustice and hardship.

(iv) The project is at variance with the growing recognition that it is necessary to move away from the long-standing engineering tradition of a supply-side response to a projected or imagined demand, and towards restraining the growth of competitive unsustainable demand for water in all uses.

(v) Assuming that some augmentation of supply is necessary, the project fails to consider alternative possibilities, of which there are several very good examples.

(vi) The idea of transferring flood waters to arid or drought-prone areas is flawed because (a) there will be hardly any flood-moderation; and (b) this project will be of no use at all to the dry lands and uplands of the country.

(vii) The idea of transferring water from surplus to deficit basins is equally flawed because the very notions of surplus and deficit are highly problematic. The idea of a surplus river ignores the multiple purposes that it serves as it flows and joins the sea, and that of a deficit river is based on demands on its waters derived from wasteful uses of water.

(viii) Careful, economical, conflict-free and sustainable intra-basin management should come first, and bringing water from elsewhere should be the last recourse.

(ix) The project holds the potential of generating new conflicts between basins.

(x) There are international dimensions to this project. Both Nepal and Bangladesh have expressed serious apprehensions that need to be taken into account.

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