நதி நீர் இணைப்பு

கடந்த 04-10-2015 எகானாமிக் டைம்ஸில் திரு.ஜி.சீதாராமன் எழுதிய கிருஷ்ணா கோதாவரி நதி நீர் இணைப்பு குறித்த பத்தி கவனத்தை ஈர்த்தது . குண்டூர், பிரகாசம் கிருஷ்ணா மாவட்டங்களிலுள்ள பதிமூன்று லட்சம் ஏக்கர் நிலங்கள் பாசன வசதி பெறும்.  திரு .ஜி.சீதாராமனின் அவர்கள் எழுதிய கட்டுரை இதோ , 
Will government's grand plan to link 37 rivers be nothing more than wishful thinking? 

Gangadhar Rao is not your usual farmer. Clothed in a crisp white shirt and white trousers, with white shoes to boot, he is also a surgeon who articulates his thoughts impeccably in English.

We meet him at a gathering of farmers in Gudivada town, about 40 km from Vijayawada, in Krishna district of eastern Andhra Pradesh.

Ten minutes into our conversation he insists we see his farmland, of which he has 40 acres in all, about five kilometres from Gudivada.

As we drive, he points to the fallow parcels of land, some grassladen and some denuded of even that, which alternate with lush paddy crops.

"The cattle are having a field day. I have never seen something like this," says the 68-year-old, looking at a few cows grazing in what used to be a paddy field.

Most of Rao's 40 acres are in Komaravolu village, which he says is former Andhra Pradesh chief minister "NT Rama Rao's father-in-law's place". Rao is a paddy farmer like most other farmers in the region. "I'm fortunate that there is water in my fields, but there are not many like me," he says, adding that he gives water from his borewell to the neighbouring fields. According to him, nearly 40 per cent of the 13 lakh acres of arable land in Krishna district have been left uncultivated this year for the first time in over a century and a half.

The farmers here used to get water from the Nagarjuna Sagar reservoir but now, according to Rao, Telangana, which was carved out of Andhra Pradesh last year and in which the dam falls, has reduced the supply citing its own requirements.

It is in this context that Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu on September 16 unveiled the linking of two rivers at Ibrahimpatnam near Vijayawada. Under this project, about 80 thousand million cubic feet (TMC) of water will be pumped into a canal at Pattiseema, 174 kilo metres away, and the canal will bring the water to a barrage at Ibrahimpatnam. The state's new proposed capital, Amaravati, which is on the banks of the Krishna, is an hour's drive from Vijayawada.

Go With the Flow 

The Krishna-Godavari link, which is part of the controversial Polavaram dam project and the grand interlinking of rivers (ILR) project, will irrigate about 13 lakh acres in Krishna, Guntur and Prakasam districts. This will help Andhra Pradesh divert a similar amount of water from the Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam reservoirs to the waterscarce Rayalaseema region.

While people like Rao are happy that the Krishna-Godavari link will bring water to their fields, they still want the Polavaram dam project completed. Opposed by Odisha andChhattisgarh, some of whose villages will be inundated thanks to the dam, and also by environmentalists as it submerges 1.5 lakh acres and displaces two lakh people, the Polavaram project is still close to the hearts of many here.

"This (Krishna-Godavari link) is only a stop-gap arrangement.

We need Polavaram," says Rao. More contentious than the Polavaram dam is ILR, which has its origins in experiments by the British colonial government in the 19th century and, more recently, in a plan mooted by Union water resources minister KL Rao in the 1972 on linking the Ganga and Cauvery from below Patna.

The idea to link rivers got a shot in the arm with the establishment of the National Water Development Agency in 1982 by then prime minister Indira Gandhi.

The first National Democratic Alliance government (1999-2004), led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was keen on executing this project, whose cost was estimated to be Rs 5,60,000 crore in 2002 (it is now pegged to be twice as much), and formed a task force for the same.

The Supreme Court, responding to a public interest litigation, in 2003 asked for the planning of the project to be completed by 2006, and the project itself by 2016. While the United Progressive Alliance government put the project in cold storage, the second NDA government, under prime minister Narendra Modi, seems to want to get the project back on track.

The idea behind ILR is to divert water from surplus rivers in the north and east, which face frequent flooding, to waterscarce regions in the west and south, where droughts are a common occurrence. ILR involves connecting 37 rivers through 30 links, 14,900-km canals and 3,000 storages. ILR is supposed to add 35 million hectares (1 hectare = 2.47 acres) to India's irrigated land, more than a third of the present gross irrigated area, and help generate 34,000 MW or over 12 per cent of the current installed capacity. India has linked some rivers in the past and globally river interlinking, which has been done in China, South Africa and Spain, among other countries, has a mixed reputation.

After the Krishna-Godavari link, work on the Ken-Betwa link, which will provide drinking water and irrigate lands in Madhya Pradeshand Uttar Pradesh, is expected to begin in December.

Stiff Criticisms 

According to the ministry of water resources, feasibility reports for 16 of the 30 links, and detailed project reports for five links, including Ken-Betwa and Par-Tapi-Narmada, have been prepared. The link has been criticized for, among other things, its impact on the Panna tiger reserve, part of which will be submerged.

ILR has been opposed by environmentalists for, among other implications, the potential loss of forests and biodiversity downstream of rivers, and the displacement of millions.

Biksham Gujja, former head of water policy at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature International, Switzerland, who was convenor of a civil society committee on ILR, says each of the links in ILR should be considered a separate project instead of all the links being clubbed as one. "Nowadays everything is feasible technologically if you forget the economics of it." Gujja says the Krishna-Godavari is among the least damaging of links since the two delta systems are similar, the flow of water is gravitational and there is surplus water in the Godavari.

S Janakarajan, professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, says the government's data on 'surplus rivers' is not reliable. "Who has done the surplus calculation and where in the river have they measured the surplus?" ILR has also been questioned for its irrigation benefits.

"Many of our irrigation projects do not benefit farmers. We have a construction mechanism which is feeding itself," says Gujja. In the last two decades, 84 per cent of the net irrigated area has relied on groundwater and only 16 per cent on canals, despite thousands of crores being spent on large and medium irrigation projects.

"Most of our dams have lost their capacity because they have silted up and, to protect the thousands of canals in ILR, the government needs to expand the public works and water resources departments. We just don't have that manpower capacity," says Janakarajan.

EAS Sarma, a former bureaucrat who was part of the civil society committee, says the government should have apprised the Supreme Court of the implications of the project. He adds, "You require a lot of budgetary resources for this project. The government may divert funds from areas like health and education."

GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director at the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, argues for a more decentralized water harvesting system than ILR. "Why should the entire rainfall come into a dam and then be diverted to other areas? Catching rain where it falls should be the mantra."

Some believe ILR may not even be completed by 2050 given the scale of the project and inter-state complications.

Several rivers like Cauvery, Godavari, Narmada and Krishna are at the centre of disputes between the respective riparian states. "The thinking on rivers is very regional, not national," says Y Nagendranath, president of Andhra Pradesh Rythanga Samakhya, a farmers' organisation.

Governments both at the Centre and states have been criticised for not studying the various links thoroughly. R K Gupta, chief engineer, Krishna & Godavari Basin Organisation, which is part of the Central Water Commission, says the Andhra Pradesh government did not consult it on the Krishna-Godavari link. "They did not send us the project report and we have come to know about it only through media reports." The state water resources department was not available for comment.

"In a hurry for the project to be the first of the links (in ILR), Naidu has made mistakes," says Nagendranath's son Venkat Nagesh. Just days after Naidu unveiled the Krishna-Godavari link, an aqueduct was breached, which Nagesh chalks up to shoddy construction. When we visit the aqueduct, near Eluru, labourers are hard at work fixing it, as a lone policeman stands watch, and the flow of water has been stopped. Nagesh believes it will take at least a year for the project to be fully operational.

The Opposition in Andhra 

Pradesh, the Congress and YSR Congress Party, have alleged irregularities in the project, which has reportedly cost the government over Rs 1,400 crore.

Instead of treating ILR as a prestige project, the Narendra Modi government would do well to weigh the financial and ecological costs against the potential benefits of each link, and also exhaust all viable alternatives before proceeding with a project with no comparable precedent anywhere in the world.

Interlinking of Rivers: An Introduction 

An idea that has been tossed about for a century and a half, transferring water from surplus Himalayan rivers to water-scarce regions in western and peninsular India got a leg-up in the 1972 when Union water resources minister KL Rao proposed the linking of the Ganga and Cauvery below Patna. In 1982, prime minister Indira Gandhi set up the National Water Development Agency to take the plan further. The first National Democratic Alliance government (1999-2004) was keen to implement the interlinking of rivers (ILR) project, and the Supreme Court, following a public interest litigation, in 2003, asked for it to be implemented by 2016 The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, which was in power from 2004 to 2014, put the project on the backburner thanks to the inter-state disputes and opposition from environmental groups, despite the Supreme Court asking it in 2012 to expedite the project. The Narendra Modi government, however, has stated its intentions to go ahead with the project and has formed a special committee for the same.

Construction activity at the site of the Pattiseema lift irrigation project, which links the rivers Godavari and Krishna near Vijayawada.

The Krishna-Godavari link will irrigate 13 lakh acres in the Krishna delta 

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