The government of India has apparently decided to take on a mega project in order to solve its problem of too much water in one place, while not enough in another. From T.V. Padma in NewScientist (3 December 2016):
The Interlinking of Rivers scheme, which government officials say is to get the green light from India’s environment ministry “imminently”, will create a water network 12,500 kilometres long – almost twice the length of the world’s longest rivers, the Nile and the Amazon.
Some 14 rivers in northern India and 16 in the western, central and southern parts of the country will be linked via 30 mega-canals and 3000 dams, costing $168 billion. In the process, 35 million hectares of new arable land will be created, as well as the means to generate an extra 34,000 megawatts of hydropower.
Geologists and ecologists are concerned, but India has its worries. From The Hindu, earlier this year:
For the purposes of monitoring, the CWC divides India’s rivers into 12 major basins. The largest of them – the Ganga basin – is not the worst case. The CWC figures for April 28 show storage to be 7.8 BCM. While that may be less than the 10.6 BCM storage at the same time last year it is 22.8 per cent more than the decadal average of 6.35 BCM.
However the numbers for the Indus basin and the Krishna basins are far from inspiring. The Indus this year is 35 per cent and the Krishna 67 per cent less than their 10-year normal.
The most updated estimates of per capita water availability in India’s river basins show stark inequality. The Brahmaputra basin, for instance, can annually support nearly 13000 cubic metres per person, whereas the Mahi has a scarce 260 cubic metres per person.
The Guardian estimates …
This year, 330 million Indians have been affected by drought. State governments used emergency measures to deliver water by train in the western state of Maharashtra; in other areas, schools and hospitals were forced to close, and hundreds of families were forced to migrate from villages to nearby cities where water is more easily accessible.
And Oblity provides this lovely diagram, along with an overview:
So what is the cost of the project? It’s in Quartz’s title of an article on the subject, “Why India’s $168 billion river-linking project is a disaster-in-waiting“. They interview a number of local experts, such as Professor Rajamani of Jawaharlal Nehru University:
The interest in river-linking now is due to the big bucks involved in it for dam builders. A canal is not a river and it cannot support an ecosystem. What happens to everything that is living in the river? When water flows, there are a number of factors associated with it. There are micro organisms and there are marine life. We are taking away all of that by building dams and diverting water for something that is not even natural. When you build dams, you are displacing too many people. What will they do? They land up in slums in cities. River-linking is a social evil, economic evil and will ultimately lead to collapse of civilisation.
Perhaps a bit of hyperbole. However, I do wonder if this is just a way for the current ruling party to secure its place through the provision of jobs on a long term basis.
The Diplomat reports on India’s neighbors’ reactions:
The ILR program’s Himalayan component envisages construction of reservoirs on the principal tributaries of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra in India and Nepal, and involves transfer of water from the eastern tributaries of the Ganga to the west, apart from linking the Brahmaputra to the Ganga and the Ganga to the Mahanadi.
As the Ganga and Brahmaputra are transboundary rivers, India’s proposed engineering of their waters would impact Nepal and Bhutan, where these rivers originate, and Bangladesh, the lower riparian country.
Nepal and Bhutan fear that, as in the case of other river projects in the past, India will pressure them to cooperate with the ILR through building dams and other storage infrastructure. There is “strong popular opposition to this idea” in these countries, Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden, has pointed out.
Such opposition could weaken already fragile ties between India and Nepal.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, is deeply apprehensive over the diversion of water from the Ganga’s tributaries upstream, and the Brahmaputra and Teesta rivers to the Ganga, as this would reduce water flows into its territory, increasing salinity of the water, rendering the soil unfit for cultivation, and resulting in the desertification of large parts of the country.
And, finally, back to NewScientist for one of the more unexpected potential results of this project:
[Chittenipattu Rajendran at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangaluru] says that the dams required by the scheme would push down on Earth’s crust, adding extra strain and possibly increasing the risk of earthquakes in the already quake-prone Himalayas.
