write a latter to the editor of a new paper about the importance of interlinking rivers?
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The initial plan to interlink India’s rivers came in 1858 from a British irrigation engineer, Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton. Since late last year, the scheme has been implemented by the Central government in several segments such as the Godavari-Krishna interlink in Andhra Pradesh, and the Ken-Betwa interlink in Madhya Pradesh. The evidence on the benefits of the interlinking scheme is mixed. On the one hand the project is built on hopes that it will boost per capita water availability for 220mn water-hungry Indians. The scheme also envisions an area more than twice the size of Andhra Pradesh receiving additional water for irrigation and to eventually even out the precarious swings between floods and droughts. Yet even as the project moves forward it must consider the risks at hand, which include the possibility that it could displace nearly 1.5 million people due to the submergence of 27.66 lakh hectares of land; and concerns surrounding escalating cost projections, which have reportedly jumped to something closer to Rs. 11 lakh crore. Part five of the six-part series focusses on river basins.
For most of March and April, Thursdays are dismal news days for India’s Central Water Commission (CWC), the nodal body responsible for commissioning dams and major water-storage bodies, and monitoring their health.
On that day they make public the state of water storage in India’s principal reservoirs and the general news has been that water has plummeted to historic lows, both in terms of the corresponding period of last year and also compared to the average storage of last ten years during the corresponding period