Breathing life into an extinct river

What would you call an apple box that has oranges inside all nicely packed? It sill is a fruit box. Something very similar, albeit of a much larger complexity and proportion, is happening near Haryana’s Kurukshetra--the land of the Mahabharata.

It's not about apples and oranges, but about river water. This may sound strange, but water from one gigantic river will flow and fill in another even more gigantic river that has gone extinct.

Some 9,000 years ago, the fierce and roaring majesty of river Saraswati, once eulogised as the mother of seven rivers flowing in the northern region, disappeared. Left behind were numerous dried river tracks beneath the earth termed as paleo-channels of the erstwhile river Saraswati.

Simply or trickily, the plan now is to get the water from Satlej and Yamuna to free-flow into the dried river track of the Saraswati in Haryana.

The work is already underway. In a way, a part of river Saraswati, literally and symbolically, will come alive and start flowing once again hundreds of centuries after it went extinct. All in just about a year. That’s the hard pressing deadline set for the task.
The only queer part of the entire mammoth exercise though is that the water in erstwhile Saraswati river will not be of its own-- just like the oranges in the apple box--but of Satlej and Yamuna. But then there’s nothing the state irrigation depart­ment can do about it. Revival of Saraswati is something even renowned geologists don’t bet on.

A 25-odd km stretch has been identified as the palleo-channel zone between Kurukshetra and Yamunanagar, where the Saraswati perhaps once flowed in all its splendour. Digging will take place in the entire stretch with precision. A 23-odd km long pipelines is intended to be laid and eventually water from the Satlej-Yamuna will be flushed into the dug-up zone. Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda made an announcement to this effect early this month maintaining that the work will finish in one year.

Besides scientific data base that was made use of, the current plan, being executed by the state irrigation department, relied upon old dilapidated British revenue record that were explored till the last rock on the ground.

The river track zone was demarcated and that’s when everything started to flow. Haryana goes to poll next year and much of what is happening around the project is being seen by Hooda’s adversaries as political manoeuvring to gain mileage out of the emotive value that people may have with the mythological tendency of the river. Holy dip in the river, once it starts to flow, is also on the religious tourism agenda.

The river, as per the Vedas, is supposed to have bestowed upon the people huge material and spiritual benefits. Along the path of the Saraswati flourished numerous agrarian civilisations. The current plan will require perpetual supply of water from the source, without which chances are that the water from the river bed may seep below and leave it dry, yet again, experts say.

The more fruitful part that has enticed geologists is the answer that this once magnificent river holds to mitigate water scarcity in starved regions. The macro plan is that Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) will dig deep within the surface in search of fresh water trapped in these deep aquifers of the lost river.

The process is likely to be outsourced to the Hyderabad-based National Geo-Physical Research Institute, sources said. Although a memorandum of understanding with stakeholders, including the governments of Haryana and Gujarat, has been signed by the ONGC to initiate digging and scientific exploration, not much has actually started on the ground. The ONGC has undertaken this project as a part of its corporate social responsibility to address issues of water scarcity in the region.

Sometime ago, a sudden gush of water from below the surface near four separate temple sites in Haryana left geologists overwhelmed in pursuit of the lost remains of the erstwhile Saraswati river. The exploration that followed reinforced their theory of the existence of numerous paleo-channels of the river, deep aquifers further below and buried remains of the river. Geologists say the river may not flow today, but its buried channels still exist in Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Dr A R Chaudhary, professor and chairman of the Geology Department, Kurukshetra University, who has pionee­red this research and is in charge of a full-fledged Saraswati River Research Laboratory at the university, said: “Satellite imageries suggest the presence of several paleo-channels indicating a major river flow that once existed. Laboratory analysis of sediments collected from the water that came out of these two sites suggest a dense mineral content of higher Himala­yan hills, which only reinforced our theory.”

Dr Chaudhary said the research is significant as it attempts to address the critical issue of water scarcity. “The existence of deeper aquifers and more significantly the phenomena of these getting re-char­ged could eventually lead to huge unta­pped fresh water reserves. The paleo-channels are also getting re-charged,” he said, adding that the disappearance of the mighty Saraswati was because of the rise in the Himalayan mountain chain, among other reasons.

Major diversions in the course of the gigantic Satlej river, which was, in fact, a major contributor of the erstwhile Sara­swati along with the Yamuna, could possibly have let the Saraswati lose its flow.