NEW DELHI: On paper, India’s ambitious, 112 billion U.S. dollar project to link together its major river systems looks good enough to drown out its most trenchant critics.

Linking the northern Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra with the peninsular rivers, Krishna, Godavari and Cauvery would, according to the government, put an end to the perennial problem of floods in one part of the vast sub-continent coinciding with droughts in another.

“We are planning for a time when India’s population reaches 1.5 billion people and there will be tremendous demands placed on water,” says Suresh Prabhu, chairman of the newly created National River-Linking Task Force that is now putting the finishing touches to a feasibility report on the issue.

The project, when complete, is expected to irrigate an additional 150 million hectares of land and generate 3,500 megawatts of electricity.

A chartered accountant with commendable innings as minister for power, Prabhu says he has for inspiration neighbouring China’s mammoth river diversion projects, including the newly begun 59 billion dollar project to coax water northward from the mighty Yangtze river to Beijing and environs.

But hydrology experts have warned that India is not China — either topographically or in its political organisation.

“As the river-linking project makes headway, more inter- state and inter-country dissensions are likely to surface,” says Sudhirendar Sharma, who heads the Delhi-based Ecological Foundation and specialises in water issues.

Already President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that any disturbance to a treaty to share the water of the Indus would be cause for war.

Another treaty to divert the water of the Ganges at the Farakka barrage, intended to simultaneously prevent Calcutta port from silting up and control floods in Bangladesh, is regarded as unsatisfactory by both sides and brought up every time the neighbours have disputes over other issues.

Within the country, southern Karnataka and Tamil Nadu states are locked in a long-standing spat over the sharing of the waters of the Cauvery river

In the north, a proposal to share the waters of the Sutlej river in Punjab with adjacent Haryana through a link canal to the Yamuna river has been one of the causes for Sikh militancy which ravaged Punjab through the eighties and early nineties.

Recently, drought-prone southern Andhra Pradesh rejected a proposal by the National Water Development Agency to link the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery rivers on the grounds for fear that farmers may not be convinced of its benefits.

But apart from such political considerations, there are serious technical hitches to what is popularly referred to in India as the “Garland Canal Project” — first proposed by a nineteenth century British engineer Arthur Cotton but shelved by a colonial government more interested in building railways.

Prof. Syed Iqbal Hasnain at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Environmental Sciences said the whole project is being undertaken without adequate understanding of the Himalayan glaciers, which fe feed the Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra (also called the Tsang Po in Tibet).

“We expect that over the next two or three decades, there will be a serious reduction of flow in the rivers which depend on melting snow and glaciers rather than monsoon rains,” says Hasnain, an internationally-known glaciologist.

According to Hasnain, any megaproject involving the Himalayan river systems could turn into an economical and environmental disaster unless it involved the best scientists and glaciologists with access to long-term databases on such factors as climate change, which is already causing the glaciers to recede rapidly.

Concerns raised by other scientists include the possibility that once the project is complete, India’s main rivers may never reach the oceans. This, they say, may have unknown consequences for the ecology.

The drying up of the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union and the fact that the Colorado River in the United States no longer reaches the sea and the fact that only 10 percent of the Nile now gets to the Mediterranean Sea are the better-known results of human beings tampering with rivers.

The garland canal is a “waste of money” and a “political gimmick,” says Medha Patkar, who leads the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) or Save the Narmada Movement, one of India’s best- known popular movements against the construction of giant dams across the westward-flowing Narmada river in the central part of the country.

“Instead of planning a national river grid, the government should be putting its effort into the efficient management of minor water sources and water sheds,” says Patkar, who holds the view that megaprojects only generate megaprofits siphoned out by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats acting in cahoots with contractors.

She also expressed fears that the project would result in the massive displacement of people, given the fact that the Narmada project never cared to adequately resettle or compensate thousands of tribals and poor farmers whose lands were submerged by the giant Sardar Sarovar dam.

Patkar’s ideas have the support of Frank Rijsberman, director general of the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute. “Small solutions that are closer to the users should be given a chance before rushing into megaprojects,” he said while in India for a workshop on water and land management policy in January.

Rijsberman commented that India’s garland canal project was “announced in despair” and was in fact a “grandiose solution” to the real and complex problem of serious water shortages that faced the country.

In spite of such criticism, Prabhu is unfazed. “We are using satellite imaging technology for the feasibility report and expect to show that the number of people likely to be displaced do not exceed 450,000.”

As for the funds, Prabhu is confident that they would come from the private sector and from multilateral agencies and could be recovered through user charges paid by direct beneficiaries. —Dawn/InterPress News Service.