Promoting it at any cost

INTERLINKING RIVERS : With its obvious defects and the huge cost involved, will the project to interlink rivers spell disaster for India's future?

A project to interlink Indian rivers was envisaged as a grand scheme to link 37 major Indian rivers by 14 Himalayan and 16 peninsular link canals, with a total length of 14,900 km, at a cost of Rs 5,60,000 crore, to ‘solve India’s recurrent flood and drought situations.’

Flood and drought occurring simultaneously in widely separated river basins led to the establishment in 1982, of the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) to study basin-wide water surpluses and deficits, and explore the possibility for storage, links and transfers of water. Accordingly, the deceptively attractive idea of simultaneous mitigation of flood and drought by an interlinking rivers (ILR) project to mass-transport water from “water-surplus” areas of the Brahmaputra and Ganga basins to the “water-deficit” areas in peninsular India, was conceived.

Kick-starting ILR: The NWDA’s idea remained dormant until APJ Abdul Kalam stated in his presidential 2002 pre-Independence Day speech that ILR was inescapable in solving India’s flood and drought problems. Taking a cue fr-om this, in September 2002 amicus curiae Advocate Ranjit Kumar prayed the Supreme Court to direct the government to take up this project. Then chief justice B N Kirpal accordingly issued notices to the states. Though there was response from only one state, he ordered the government to take up and complete the ILR project in the shortest possible time.

The ILR project was thus born, without obtaining data, without adequate application of mind and without a study of alternatives, without discussion in Parliament, and without scrutiny by the Planning Commission.

With unseemly haste, and by-passing all planning procedures and checks for major projects, the Vajpayee-led NDA-1 government kick-started the ILR project by constituting a task force (TF) for ILR in December 2002, and set the target completion date as December 31, 2016.

Under a dynamic chairman, the ILR TF went to great lengths and expense to popularise the idea of ILR. Sensing huge profits, CII and FICCI readily helped in organising seminars, etc.

When questioned on the planning processes, the chairman sometimes stated that ILR was “a concept” and at other times, he described it as “a project”, displaying unbecoming confusion or calculated obfuscation. For its part, NWDA claimed that ILR would provide irrigation water for 35 million hectares of farmland and supply 34 million kW of hydroelectricity, but never substantiated its claims with data.

Opposition: Objections and multi-disciplinary arguments against ILR were ra-ised by scientists, engineers, social scientists, grassroots and civil society activists, and others, but the government stone-walled, ignored, or sidestepped them.

The fundamental opposition to ILR was that the mega project was ill-conceived and a case of reverse planning logic that, without consideration of all alternatives to solve the problem of water availability, government had decided a priori that ILR was a solution, and proceeded to the modalities of its implementation. Partly due to stiff resistance, ILR TF was wound up on Dec 29, 2004 – having “completed its role”, as the new UPA government put it – and became a Special Cell in MoWR, to coordinate the planning and work, and prepare DPRs.

Revival: On November 25, 2008, the Supreme Court asked the government why not even a single link out of the 30 planned was underway, and was info-rmed that consensus between states had not yet been worked out and even where it was done, the signatures of the state governments had not been obtained. The Bench directed the government to file a detailed status report by January 2009, indicating the proposed dates for completion of the feasibility reports.

On December 2, 2009, UPA’s Water resources minister P K Bansal told the Lok Sabha that interlinking Himalayan with peninsular rivers (re-estimated at Rs 4,44,000 crore) was unaffordable, but that Himalayan and peninsular rivers would be linked separately.

In October 2011, questioning whether ILR project would require land acquisition, CJI Justice S H Kapadia observed: “My concern is only on what is the financial liability of the project. We want to make it clear that we would not pass ord-er on it if it causes huge financial burden”.

He also directed amicus curiae Ranjit Kumar to file a report on the financial viability of the project in a month’s time, and scheduled the next hearing for January 2012. Clearly, there was confusion in government circles on the financial, economic and environmental viability of ILR project.

Neoliberal agenda

On February 27, 2012, the Supreme Court, in disposing of two writ petitions on ILR dating back to 2002, directed the government to implement the project by setting up a special committee whose decisions would take precedence over all administrative bodies created under the orders of the Supreme Court.

It directed the Union Cabinet to take all final and appropriate decisions within 30 days and granted “liberty to the learned amicus curiae to file contempt petition in the Supreme Court, in the event of default or non-compliance of the directions contained in its order”. Unaccountably, this judicial over-reach into the arena of the executive, was not objected to by the UPA-2 government.

With the NDA-2 government coming to power in May 2014, Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti vigorously revived the NDA-1 government's original ILR proposal. Thus, the ILR project was promoted by successive Central governments, spurred by a succession of SC jud-ges. This reveals the neoliberal economic agenda of the politician-bureaucrat-corporate nexus pursued over 14 years.

It is worth noting that in January 2002, in the context of water conservation and availability, then PM Vajpayee wisely recommended: “Catch every raindrop where it falls”. However, his no-conflict, low-cost, practical idea of water conservation was rudely pushed aside on August 14, 2002 by Abdul Kalam, and was strangely never questioned by Vajpayee.

Interestingly, UPA’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh declared in 2009 that the ILR project would be a “human, ecological and economic disaster for the country.” With the ILR project’s obvious birth defects, will it spell disaster for India’s future?

(The writer, a retired Major General, is with People’s Union for Civil Liberties)