The decade-old effort by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Government to push the river-interlinking project has invited its share of opposition from politicians and environmentalists.

With the Narendra Modi-led Cabinet clearing the Ken-Betwa river linking project, which involves Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, within the first 100 days of assuming power, voices of protest from environmentalists are rising once again. It is among the 30 river-linking projects that were given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court in February 2012, and includes construction of a dam upstream on the Ken river.

One reason why this particular project has invited criticism is that implementing it will submerge 4,600 hectares of the Panna Tiger Reserve and about 8,650 acres of forest land.

Overall, the river-interlinking project is expected to displace about 5.5 million people, most of them tribals and farmers, estimates the World Wildlife Fund.

Environmentalists feel the entire interlinking programme is “reckless” and will lead to a major redesign of the country’s geography.

“Nature divided us into different regions because of natural reasons… The idea of transferring water from rivers, which receive flood waters to rivers that are drought-prone goes against nature’s principles and can alter the hydrology and ecological conditions of rivers to an irrecoverable extent,” says Ranjan Panda, Convenor, Water Initiatives, Odisha.

While activists admit that scarce water resources are a serious challenge for the country, they feel what is needed is a more scientific and sensitive approach to the problem as well as “careful, economical, conflict-free and sustainable intra-basin management”.

“Civilizations that have developed near river basins have traditionally created their own coping mechanisms, such as drought-resistant farming or devising skills to benefit from floods and the silt deposits that they carry,” says Panda.

He says forced structural alterations can be disastrous for society in the long run when these alternations start to fail, which they are bound to do. He cites the example of the Hirakud dam on the Mahanadi river which has killed downstream rivers. “What we now see in Mahanadi basin is that the drought-affected upper basin people are facing flash floods.”

Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, says the project to interlink rivers ignores the reality that the mainstay of India’s water needs is groundwater and will remain so for many years to come.

The IIT Mumbai-trained engineer says river interlinking is basically an extension of the ‘big dam’ agenda, quoting former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had written on the file of the Tehri dam, “This project will only benefit the contractors.”

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