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New Delhi, 18 January 2003
The
linking of our major rivers is a grandiose project of gigantic
proportions. In the words of Mohan Guruswamy, whose article on this
subject follows,
“The
scheme is humongous. It will link the Brahmaputra and Ganga with the
Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna, which in turn will connect to the
Pennar and Cauvery. On the other side of the country it will connect
the Ganga and Yamuna with the Narmada traversing in part the
supposed route of the mythical Saraswathi.”
The
project had been on the anvil since the 1800s when the British first
thought of it and its conception has had an ‘on again off again’
history. The project has once again come to the forefront through
the efforts of none other than our President APJ Abdul Kalam, who
like Jawarlal Nehru is a thinker and a dreamer, though with a
scientific basis to his dreams of making India a Great Nation. The
project if it succeeds may be the saviour of India, to provide
drinking and irrigation water to every nook and corner of the
country at the same time saving it from perennial floods. Mohan
Guruswamy feels the project needs to come out into the open and be
debated purposefully with a view to being implemented for India’s
benefit.
With
our healthy forex reserves and a reasonably stable economy, we have
no doubt that with political resolve our country is capable of
achieving this stupendous task.
“China’s
Chairman is our Chairman!”
By
Mohan Guruswamy
The
nation seems set to undertake history’s greatest civil engineering
project by seeking to link all our major rivers. It will
irretrievably change India. If it works, it will bring water to
almost every parched inch of land and just about every parched
throat in the land. On the other hand if it doesn’t work, Indian
civilization as it exists even now might then be headed the way of
the Indus valley or Mesopotamian civilizations destroyed by a
vengeful nature, for interfering with nature is also a two edged
sword. If the Aswan High Dam turned the ravaging Nile into a savior,
the constant diversion of the rivers feeding Lake Baikal have turned
it into a fast receding and highly polluted inland sea ranking it
one of the world’s greatest ecological disasters. Even in the USA,
though the dams across the Colorado have turned it into a ditch by
the time it enters Mexico, Nevada and California are still starved
for water. I am not competent to comment on these matters and I will
leave this debate for the technically competent and our perennial
Pooh-Bahs.
But
the lack of this very debate is cause for concern. It is true that
the idea of linking up our rivers has been afloat for a long time.
Sir Arthur Cotton was the first propose it in the 1800’s. The late
KL Rao, considered by many to be an outstanding irrigation engineer
and a former Union Minister for Irrigation, revived this proposal in
the late 60’s by suggesting the linking the Ganges and Cauvery
rivers. It was followed in 1977 by the more elaborate and gargantuan
concept of garland canals linking the major rivers, thought up by a
former airline pilot, Captain Dastur. Morarji Desai was an
enthusiastic supporter of this plan. The return of Indira Gandhi in
1980 sent the idea back into dormancy, where it lay all these years,
till President APJ Abdul Kalam revived it in his eve of the
Independence Day address to the nation. It is well known that
Presidents of India only read out what the Prime Ministers give them
and hence the ownership title of Captain Dastur’s idea must now
vest with Atal Behari Vajpayee.
That
India has an acute water problem is widely known. Over sixty percent
of our cropped areas are still rain-fed, much too abjectly dependent
on the vagaries of the monsoon. The high incidence of poverty in
certain regions largely coincides with the source of irrigation,
clearly suggesting that water for irrigation is integral to the
elimination of poverty. In 1950-51 when Jawaharlal Nehru embarked on
the great expansion of irrigation by building the “temples of
modern India” by laying great dams across our rivers at places
like Bhakra Nangal, Damodar Valley and Nagarjunasagar only 17.4% or
21 million hectares of the cropped area of 133 million hectares was
irrigated. That figure rose to almost 35% by the late 80s and much
of this was a consequence of the huge investment by government on
irrigation, amounting to almost Rs.50, 000 crores. Ironically enough
this also coincided with the period when water and land revenue
rates began to steeply decline to touch today’s nothing level.
Like in the case of power, it seems that once the activity ceased to
be profitable to the State, investment too tapered off.
It’s
therefore good to know that after a long hibernation the State has
woken up to the problem. But it does seem that to make up for this
long neglect the State wants to now do it with a big bang or with
one great leap forward? It also does seem that as with the other big
bang in Pokharan little thought has gone into it, but this big bang
is fraught with far more grave consequences. Any physicist, even one
as qualified as Murli Manohar Joshi, will tell you the consequences
of a big bang take a very long time to fully unfold and a
gerontocracy of septuagenarians and octogenarians may just not be
that farseeing when deciding on such matters? Just look at the bucks
that will go into this big bang. It will cost Rs. 560,000 crores and
entail the spending of almost 2% of our GNP for the next ten years.
The
order to get going with the project a Supreme Court bench made up of
Chief Justice BN Kirpal, and Justices KG Balakrishnan and Arjit
Pasayat, which was hearing a PIL filed by the Dravida Peervai an
obscure Tamil activist group. The learned Supreme Court sought the
assistance a Senior Advocate, Mr. Ranjit Kumar, and acknowledging
his advice recorded: “The learned Amicus Curiae has drawn our
attention to Entry 56 List of the 7th Schedule to the
Constitution of India and contends that the interlinking of the
inter-State rivers can be done by the Parliament and he further
contends that even some of the States are now concerned with the
phenomena of drought in one part of the country, while there is
flood in other parts and disputes arising amongst the egalitarian
States relating to sharing of water. He submits that not only these
disputes would come to an end but also the pollution levels in the
rivers will be drastically decreased, once there is sufficient water
in different rivers because of their inter-linking.” The only
problem with this formulation is that neither the learned Amicus
Curiae nor the learned Supreme Court are quite so learned as to come
to such sweeping conclusions. We also know that their word is the
law and we are if anything a society of laws! Our politicians, ever
ready to welcome something so gigantic with the promise to change
the lives of, not just succeeding generations of Indians, but their
own succeeding generations, have welcomed this enthusiastically.
After all we can trust them to know a good thing when they see it!
With
summary agreement about so much good coming out of this, it is no
surprise that the learned Supreme Court was persuaded to hasten the
government into telescoping the proposed forty year time span of the
project to just ten years. However unwise this may be, it seems not
unusual for nations to embark on major projects on similar inexpert
advice. The plan to build the Three Gorges dam across the Yangtze
was first presented to Chairman Mao Zedong by Li Yishan a party
apparatchik who was neither an engineer nor scientist or even a
lawyer. Mao was so moved by the plan that he immediately lapsed into
poetry and wrote: “Over tall chasms will be a calm lake, and if
the goddess of these mountains is not dead, she will marvel at the
changed world.”
The
scheme is humongous. It will link the Brahmaputra and Ganges with
the Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna, which in turn will connect to
the Pennar and Cauvery. On the other side of the country it will
connect the Ganges, Yamuna with the Narmada traversing in part the
supposed route of the mythical Saraswathi. There are many smaller
links as well such as joining the Ken and Betwa rivers in MP, the
Kosi with the Gandak in UP, and the Parbati, Kalisindh and Chambal
rivers in Rajasthan. The project when completed will consist of 30
links, with 36 dams and 10,800 kms of canals diverting 174,000
million cubic meters of water. The total cost of Rs. 560,000 crores
is almost double the current years expected combined tax revenues
amounting to Rs.290, 000 crores of the Central and State
governments. Given current budgetary trends, the Governments may
even have to double their annual deficits to fund this venture. Not
that it can’t be done or is not being done elsewhere.
The
Chinese have embarked on a US$200 billion infrastructure expansion
just to remake Chongqing into the metropolis of the Chinese
heartland. They also want to divert another 48 billion cubic meters
of water from the north to the south, apart from constructing the
world’s largest dam, longest bridge, fastest train and highest
railroad. The Chinese plan to spend about 15% of the GDP each year
on infrastructure, for otherwise it may not be possible to sustain
their blistering pace of economic growth. They can well afford such
investments for they have an annual trade surplus of over US$ 25
billion and foreign reserves in excess of US$ 190 billion.
In
the heydays of the Naxalite movement in Bengal, CPI (ML) cadres used
to chant the slogan “China’s Chairman is our Chairman, Long Live
Chairman Mao!” In a way it seems to have come true.
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