A plan as a canal of hope

The real debate on Sardar Sarovar now concerns the implementation phase. To some, however, it is still in the cul de sac of the mirages they...

The real debate on Sardar Sarovar now concerns the implementation phase. To some, however, it is still in the cul de sac of the mirages they had created, like water will not flow, there is no plan and the Adivasis will not move.

There is a 566-page published plan called, ‘Planning for Prosperity and Related Studies’. The dam is there, so is a big canal, the biggest irrigation canal in the world, in fact. It has the capacity of a big river — a Yamuna in high flood. Some 19,823 Adivasis have been moved from their homes. They are unhappy because any one moved from their lands are unhappy. But like me — who originally came from Pakistan but now lives in the rural district of Ahmedabad — they have made new homes. Their living standards, though varied, have improved according to annual evaluation studies. This does not happen always to the millions of other Adivasis who have had to move because of factories, towns, mines and other projects.

Critics, some very thoughtful ones, maintain that there is no evidence that the plan is being implemented. Water is flowing but it is being wasted. The tail-enders would never get it because of three reasons. There is a lot of water right now. The dam has almost reached 320 feet, water is flowing into the main canal and power is being generated. The upstream dam on the Narmada Sagar is not ready. So Sardar Sarovar is diverting almost a virgin river into Gujarat. This creates a mirage of plentiful water, since even the original plan had shown with very detailed accounts of ten daily flows that, in these conditions, Gujarat would get twice the water it eventually would. This means that nobody is saying that water is scarce in Gujarat. But it is well known that in another decade Gujarat will be water scarce even with Sardar Sarovar. If they don’t save water now, it will never go to the deserving.

Second, under these conditions, the political masters keep telling everybody that there is water for everybody and more, and are promising it to even those who were not supposed to get it in the original plan. That document had stated that a link canal could be made in Saurashtra and in north Gujarat water could go beyond the plan, which could be sourced from the water that would spill to the sea. But the spills in a reliable sense were very little and, even on an “average”, were less than two lakh acre feet. No promises could therefore be made. But now promises are made on the basis of average flows. Water has to be delivered “reliably” and not in an “average” year. In a famous project in Tamil Nadu, a second canal was constru- cted to divide the available water in alternate years based on “average” availability. But the water delivery system was destroyed.

Third, the critics say that the designed water delivery plan is not practical. It grafts a computerised water delivery technology on to an old fashioned irrigation bureaucracy run by the old Bombay Irrigation Act and its successors. It is a crazy idea which did not and will not work.

To the critics it has to be said that no plan works exactly the way it is written. This, in fact, is the first law of Indian development, but that does not mean that we don’t make progress. In a water scarce regime more water is not a curse, but a blessing. People know that. They also know it is not going to last eternally. The first year it came, some experts advised that the extra water should be put in all the ponds, vavs, talaavs and beels in the state. Thousands of years ago they did it in Dhola Vira. Do it again. At first there was no response, but soon the authorities agreed. When there is more water it is the time to conserve. This is the time also to raise the groundwater table. It is now understood that this is not for ever. Also we will learn to use the canal water together with the groundwater and with the storages at the village like talaavs and taalavdis and that knowledge gained is for ever. Already in Gujarat the farmer builds farm level ponds in a big way.

The last argument is wrong. The newspapers carry the ad of the Sardar Sarovar Canal Automation project. This is for the Vadodara Branch Canal, for a remote monitoring and control system for the canal network interfacing with the supervisory control and data acquisition system. The plan had shown how it will be applied in an agriculture with lakhs of farmers, whereas in the West there were only a few thousands. But now there is a published work out of the details of an operational system of management for canal automation and it will be implemented and will spread. A country as good at software as India can surely solve this one for the first time in the third world.

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The second critique is the most difficult one to answer. But in a published plan everyone knows how much he is getting and will not take less. More than that cannot be given. We must have faith in the people. Already community groups have photocopied the entire plan. Democracies have slow but strange ways of working.