(Photo : Wikimedia Commons/Timothy A. Gonsalves)
India is about to launch a mega project that has been in the works for over a century. The massive project aims to link rivers to supply water shortage in other areas of the country.
India To Address Water Shortage Using Massive Engineering Project
In India, major floods frequently occur in one area, as severe water shortages in another. Indians are frequently left longing for a means to even out the injustices-to transform the excess of one region into a remedy for the other-when these twin tragedies transpire.
Because the Himalayan glaciers and rains feed the Indo-Gangetic rivers, they are eternal. Nonetheless, because the Indian Peninsula's rivers are mostly supplied with rain by the southwest monsoon, they are not seasonal. As a result, the states on the peninsula experience droughts and the Indo-Gangetic lowlands experience floods.
Floods and droughts can be largely avoided if this extra water is transferred from the Plains to the Peninsula. Therefore, a fair distribution of river waters throughout India will result from the interconnection of rivers.
Over a century in the making, India is ready to embark on a massive engineering project that will link several of the subcontinent's rivers, combining the erratic flows of nearby watersheds to create a mega-water grid that stretches from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
The National River Linking Project (NRLP), which links 37 rivers in India with a network of about 3000 storage dams, aims to move water from the water-excess basin to the water-deficient basin. This will create an enormous water grid over South Asia.
Under the NRLP, the National Water Development Agency of India would excavate 30 linkages that are expected to move 200 billion cubic meters of water annually around the nation. That is about twice as much water as the Fraser River in British Columbia receives each year. The objective is to support India's hydroelectric power generation while aiding in the irrigation of tens of millions of hectares of crops. Experts claim that the project, which is expected to cost US $168 billion, is "unique in its unrivaled grandiosity."
The project is currently in progress. Director general of India's water agency, Bhopal Singh, said the government has "awarded its top priority." The first link in the grid, which connects the Ken and Betwa Rivers in central India, has received approval from the government, and Singh predicts that the contract for building it will be issued soon.
National River Linking Project Concern
Sir Arthur Cotton, the Chief Engineer of the Madras Presidency, first proposed the notion of connecting rivers in 1919. In 1960, KL Rao, who was the State Minister for Energy and Irrigation at the time, resurrected the notion of connecting the Ganga and Cauvery rivers.
Similar projects have already been done in other countries worldwide. China has the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, while Sri Lanka diverts water from the Mahaweli Ganga river basin, and it helps a lot of people. Upali Amarasinghe, a data scientist with the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka, believed that a similar project in India could also have financial benefits.
However, specialists in water management and science are skeptical about the scheme's scientific foundation. They fear that the possible unforeseen effects of shifting so much water have not been sufficiently considered by the authorities. For example, a recent study indicates that the river interlinking project may impact India's monsoon season.
Tejasvi Chauhan, a water engineer and biosphere modeler at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and lead author of the study, said many assumed that river basins are independent systems, so one's output can be used to feed another. However, according to him, rivers are "part of a hydrological system," and changing one can lead to changes in another.
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