Raining down on a good idea

The Indian land mass receives an average annual precipitation of 4,000 billion cubic metres (BCM), 75 per cent of it in the three-month monsoon period. But the available resource is only about 1,950 BCM, the rest being lost to immediate evaporation and soil moisture. However, due to topographical and geological constraints, the utilisable quantum of water is estimated as only about 1,100 BCM (700 BCM from surface flows and 400 BCM from groundwater). Understandably, even this is not uniformly distributed within the country as the rainfall varies from 11,000 mm in the North-East to 100 mm in the western regions.

Thus the main characteristic of India’s water resources is its uneven distribution across the land, leading to endemic and sporadic problems of floods and droughts. The creation of a national water grid, as envisaged in the mega project linking the water-rich Himalayan rivers such as the Brahmaputra with the seasonal peninsular rivers, would have helped reduce the miseries faced by millions every year.

The subject of inter-basin transfer of waters is not a new one in the country. Such transfers have already been taking place on a limited scale in various parts of India for centuries. To name a few: Ganga Canal, Western Yamuna Canal, Kurnool Cuddapah Canal etc. The projects constructed recently, or under construction, include the Indira Gandhi Nahar Project (Rajasthan) and the Sardar Sarovar Project (Gujarat).

From past experience within the country and abroad, water professionals have been insisting on creation of major, medium and minor storages, and inter-basin transfer of water from surplus to deficit basins to even out the variations of water availability in space and time, and to facilitate equitable distribution and optimal utilisation of this precious resource.

Considering proposals such as the Ganga-Cauvery Link suggested by former Union minister of Irrigation and Power Dr K L Rao (1974), the Garland Canals Scheme of Captain Dastur (1976) etc, the Government of India set up a National Water Development Agency (NWDA) in 1980 to prepare a plan. After considerable studies, the NWDA came out with a scheme comprising an interlinked Himalayan rivers component—to transfer surplus flows from the Himalayan rivers to the arid west—and a peninsular rivers component for similar transfer from surplus to deficit basins in the south.

Subsequently, a task force under the chairmanship of Suresh Prabhu was appointed by the Government of India to prepare a timeframe for the implementation of the project. However, nothing much could be achieved on the ground due to the incessant attack on the project concept by self-appointed experts, cynics and activists, taking advantage of the political confusion in the country. hey condemned all the earlier studies done, claiming that small, local harvesting structures are the panacea for all water-related problems.

Slogans like ‘‘Catch the rain where it falls’’, ‘‘Small is beautiful’’ etc were raised by these wise men in national and international fora to ingratiate themselves to a class of people inside and outside the country. Weapons of mass disinformation were launched to attack Nehru’s ‘‘temples of modern India’’, charging them as monsters concealing time bombs waiting to cause devastation. According to them, the engineer-contractor-politician nexus was interested only in mega projects due to ‘‘other reasons’’ and not in small environment-friendly projects like in Ralegaon Siddhi.

The local water-harvesting experience of Ralegaon Siddhi, spearheaded by Anna Hazare, is an excellent example of how a dedicated selfless leader like Anna Hazare can put his vision into practice to green his countryside. The area has been irrigated with water from a small storage and supplemented by pumping from a canal, thus facilitating a small-scale inter-basin transfer of water to ensure availability even when monsoon fails. While talking about this project, the critics of large projects—being largely uninformed on the subject—make it evident that they don’t know about the feature of using canal waters in the area. They also seem to be unaware of the fact that in a scenario of undependable and irregular monsoon, of limited duration, small storages would dry up unless supplemented by major/medium projects. The sceptics are also forgetting that long-distance water transfer is a means to end human sufferings from frequent droughts and floods.

If the critics succeed in stalling this project, the well-studied proposals of the NWDA are likely to slip into the shadows of history. Future generations would then have a cause to blame us for wasting too much of time in analysis, resulting in paralysis of needed action, thereby leaving a trail of water-scarcity problems for them to solve. Let us not allow this to happen and instead, hasten to implement the proposals, which are harbingers of hope to those millions whose lives hang slenderly on the recurring ravages of floods and starkness of drought and hunger.

(The writer is Member-Secretary, Indian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage)