India plans to divert water from major rivers to tackle drought

India plans to divert water from several of its rivers to counter the severe drought raging across the country, despite dire opposition from environmentalists.

Water resources minister Uma Bharti said redirecting water, including from major rivers such as the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in eastern India to drought-hit regions, is her governments "foremost priority".

“The water crisis will be there in the future, because of climate change. But through the inter-linking of rivers we will be able to help the people,” she said earlier this week.

More than 330 million people across 13 of 29 Indian provinces are badly affected by the drought, suffering severe water and food shortages and galloping unemployment, besides battling searing hot temperatures of more than 45 degrees.

Scanty monsoon rains over the past two years have triggered this catastrophe, which had resulted in the mass migration of rural populations.

It had also prompted water rationing, stationing of armed guards at reservoirs and dispatching water tankers to particularly parched regions in the west.

India has faced a water crisis for decades. Its ground water has depleted to alarming levels, primarily because of unsustainable extraction for agriculture and industry.

The government’s questionable inter-linking of rivers (ILR) scheme to deal with this water scarcity involves connecting 30-odd peninsular and Himalayan rivers fed by glaciers in the north, which too are in retreat due to global warming.

It is projected to cost €148 billion, an amount experts anticipate will spiral, beggaring provinces through which the water links passed, as they would have to foot their construction bill.

And since there was scanty data to support the ILR project, experts warned that the project ran the real risk of being abandoned midway, leaving financial and environmental chaos in its wake.

Environmentalists oppose the scheme on grounds that it would further ecologically ravage India, but the government’s stand is that the supreme court had approved its implementation in 2012, in a “time-bound manner”.

Activists also claim that the project is also not socially viable, as it would disrupt more than a million people, who would then be permanently rendered homeless, considering successive governments’ dismal past record in resettling displaced populations.

Ms Bharati, however, is of the view that the public had welcomed ILR and was “happily ready to be displaced”.

She also claimed that once implemented, the IRL would irrigate 35,000 hectares of land and generate 34,000 megawatts of power.

Meanwhile, experts such as V Rajamani, professor emeritus at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said river linking was a "social and economic evil that would ultimately lead to the collapse of civilisation".

It entailed building dams, which he warned would displace far too many people who will end up in slums in cities.

Others maintained that the ILR project was based on the idea of diverting water from where it was surplus to dry areas.

"But there has been no scientific study yet on which places have more water and which have less," said Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network.

“All you have is an incomplete study that says this is good for the country. One has to exhaust all options and potentials before concluding that river linking is the best alternative,” he said.