Interlinking the rivers of India : Advantages and Disadvantages.

Interlinking Indian national rivers has taken centre stage because of the enormous estimated cost. Proponents claim that there will be great advantages and few disadvantages, while opponents claim that there are serious disadvantages in terms of climatical, financial and social aspects. This issue deserves debate, lets discuss here what are the advantages and disadvantageou of the project.

2 Answers

1. The question is why we want to do interlinking of rivers? A river serves to drain off a natural drainage basin, except in the case of ice fed rivers. Interlinking of rivers is proposed to augment the short water supply in a river ( say river A ) by joining it to a river (say river B ) which has an excess of water as compared to its requirement. Now a question arises why water is short than the requirement in river A. Whether the diagnostic analysis of water use in the drainage basin A has been done and the water use has been found economical, reasonable and convincing? If not, efforts should be done to improve water delivery system and to make the water consumption reasonable. As regards river B, whether the existing and future demands of water say for 50 years, in river basin B have been determined and water is in excess? if so, than the quantity of water in excess of the calculated demand, should be determined and may be considered for transfer to river basin B. If the river basin B does not have adequate water, then the idea of interlinking of river B with A may be dropped.

2. The long-term ecological, financial and social consequences of interlinking rivers should be evaluated before any such project is taken up in India.As this project has many advantages but when I think about the bid dams need to prepare for these project, what will be the scenario of the rehabilitation etc. What about the technology needed are we in position to put such a huge amount in a project when we know the corruption level we have in our home? No doubt the project is advantageous but according to me the social impacts will be heart breaking for poor families who will be dislocated during the operation. Look at the past small small projects and we can learn that the poor are the one who suffers.