In this third article in the series, Sarika Jain argues that interlinking of rivers is not economically viable and in fact raises numerous socio-political and environmental problems.

Floods and droughts affect vast areas of India, transcending state boundaries. One-sixth area of the country is drought-prone. Out of 40 million hectare of the flood prone area in the country, on an average, floods affect an area of around 7.5 million hectare per year (National Water Policy, 2002, Government of India). Any project or the combination of projects which is implemented to counter this, has to be not only the most cost, time and energy effective but also one that is most socio-economically just.

The feasibility of many decentralized small scale projects as an alternative to the centralized interlinking of rivers project or a combination of the two needs to be assessed. Following are some of the structural and institutional alternatives to the interlinking of rivers.

Rainwater and floodwater harvesting
In India, from 19th century onward, the dependence on surface water has increased substantially as opposed to decline in use of rainwater and floodwater. One possible solution to the water crisis being faced by the country is going back to the old tried and tested methods of the past, those of rainwater harvesting. Rain is the source of all water on the earth. If we capture rain where it falls, it will be sufficient to fulfill the needs of that particular area.

India receives an average of 100hrs of rain in a year. The challenge is to capture this rain and use it over 8660hrs that make up the rest of the year. The method of capture and the amount of capture varies from one region to another, depending on the topography, amount of precipitation, type of soil, etc. For this purpose India can be divided into various ecological regions and the harvesting techniques accordingly implemented.

Two examples of traditional methods of harvesting are explained below to capture the diversity in the traditional water harvesting techniques being employed in rural areas of the country (1).
Kuis/Beris – used in Rajasthan, these are 10-12m deep pits used to capture seepage. The mouth of the pit is made narrow to prevent water from evaporating. The pit gets wider as it burrows under the ground so that the water can seep into a large surface area.
Bamboo Drip Irrigation - Meghalaya has an ingenious system of tapping of stream and spring water by using bamboo pipes to irrigate plantations. About 18-20 liters of water entering the bamboo pipe system per minute gets transported over several hundred meters and finally gets reduced to 20-80 drops per minute at the site of the plant. This 200-year-old system is used by the tribal farmers of Khasi and Jaintia hills to drip-irrigate their black pepper cultivation.

Rooftop rainwater harvesting
In urban areas where a lot of open space is not available for harvesting rain water, rooftops can be utilized for this purpose. This does not require very high capital investment or restructuring of existing building. It can facilitate recharging of groundwater, which is major issue in urban areas having a high percentage of impermeable surface area. Rooftop water harvesting can also helping reducing the pollution caused in the surface water bodies by urban water runoff.

For large scale implementation, governmental support will be required in terms of providing incentives to the citizens to do so or by making it a national policy. It has been made mandatory for all government building in Chennai and other big cities to meet their demands of water to certain extent.

Community Participation
Under the British Rule, the State took over the role of being the sole provider, caused the reduction in the role of communities and households in being the primary agents of water provision and management. This continued in India after independence as well when dams were looked upon as the temples of the new era. The power of a community and the role it can play in fending for itself given the means to do so, cannot be over emphasized.

The success of the communities in Sukhomajri village (North India), Rajasthan (west India desert like region ), Ralegan Sindhi Village (Central India) have set an example for the rest of the country to follow (2). Here people have taken the ownership of the hydraulic structures they have built using the expertise of NGOs like the Tarun Bhagat Sangh and the financial aid from the Government of India and have succeeded in bringing prosperity to their communities. The decisions regarding these community owned structures and water are made by ‘Gram Sabhas’, which in itself is a shift from representative to participatory democracy.

Improving efficiency of already existing infrastructure
In my opinion, it is absolutely essential to improve the efficiency of the water already available to us and the structures that already exist. Investment of our limited resources in these is likely to be fruitful. Expanding the irrigated area, getting more water will be useful only in tandem with efforts to build highly efficient new structures and improvement in efficiency of what we already have.

Before the implementation of any project, a complete assessment of its impact needs to be done and alternatives studied in detail. This is especially true when the project is on as large a scale as the Interlinking of Rivers and can have enormous impacts on the economy and the ecology of the country. The alternatives to interlinking, suggested have their own disadvantages (water is managed at a local scale rather than regional or watershed scale, water might not be enough to meet the needs of irrigation and urban water supplies, etc), but when implemented in conjunction with other projects, these alternatives might turn out to be much more efficient and cost effective than one large interlinking project. Institutional changes like shift from representative to participatory democracy can get rid of the evils of politics and bureaucracy which plague the functioning of the Indian Government and give more power to the communities.

The interlinking of rivers project has been shared by the Government with the public solely as an idea. The exact numbers and research done by the government agencies have been kept strictly confidential. Information regarding this project should be made available to the scientific community and the public so as to enable them to judge, comment and if required contest the project that has the potential to change their lives and the lives of the future generations dramatically.
- Sarika Jain

Reference:
1. www.rainwaterharvesting.org
2. Making Water Management Everybody’s Business: Water Harvesting and Rural Development in India, Agarwal Anil, Narain Sunita, Gatekeeper Series no. 87, 1999,International Institute for Environment and Development, Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods Program.

Related Articles:
Interlinking of Rivers in India
Interlinking of Rivers: Projected Benefits and pitfalls
River-Linking and Assam’s Interests
Water: to privatize or not to privatize