Mainly 3 challenges
- Political When Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have stopped just short of violence over sharing Cauvery waters, is it likely that so many states will agree to share this most precious of all resources? There are issues too with our neighbours: When the Farakka barrage has proved such a contentious issue with Bangladesh, how will it countenance any diversion of the Ganga and Brahmaputra in summer? And precisely at a time when external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj is making her first visit to Dhaka to discuss the Teesta water issue?
- Engineering The second is engineering. There are tremendous difficulties not only in creating barrages across rivers and canals to carry water but also to lift water from the supposedly surplus Indo-Gangetic plain to the deficient Deccan peninsula — up to 116 metres, requiring some 3,700 MW of power, also a resource which is severely short. When there has not been a single dam or irrigation project that has met deadlines or kept within its budget, is it realistic to expect a slew of such mega projects to do so?
- Environmental The third is environmental. The inter-linking of rivers takes a technocratic view of rivers as entities that can be “cabined, cribbed and confined”. But rivers have a life of their own and any constriction of their flow can have disastrous consequences downstream. Thus, to imagine that westward-flowing rivers, which originate in the Western Ghats, can be dammed to redirect their flow to stop flowing “wastefully to the sea” and join the eastward-flowing Godavari, is to negate their distinct ecological role. As it is, these ghats, a Unesco World Heritage Site, are threatened as one of the eight ‘hottest hotspots’ in the world for their enormous plant and animal species.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/analysis/a-hydro-hubris/article1-1230988.aspx
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