New report pours cold water on river projects
As the government mulls the final nod for linking the Ken and Betwa rivers, a report on water management raises fresh environmental and social concerns
The Ken-Betwa river interlinking project is likely to get the government’s green nod after Union Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave recommended that the country should experiment with one such project before taking a decision on others.
The minister spoke his mind even as the experts empanelled by his ministry for the green clearance were yet to recommend the project. His cabinet colleague and Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti had taken a step further away from ministerial decorum in June when she threatened to go on a hunger strike if the project did not get the nod.
The linking of the two rivers has been sold as the panacea for water problems facing Bundelkhand, and it has Bharti weighing in the project’s favour even as she takes a contrasting view on the hydro-power projects slated for the upper Ganga basin — her views based as much on the religious significance of the river as the ecological impact dams built close to one another could have in the fragile Himalayan ranges.
In a rare instance of infighting between the ministries making it to the courts in this government, her ministry has argued against the environment ministry rather vehemently and asked that dams on the upper Ganga basin be prevented.
As both these issues near a decisive step, a report “A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms” authored by a committee chaired by Mihir Shah, makes a case for a revamp of how the government looks at both, heavily-engineered water systems and the institutions that monitor and regulate water resources in India. The report, though, is unlikely to feed into the government’s decisions on heavy engineering water resources. An outdated model The inter-linking of peninsular and Himalayan rivers was envisaged decades ago when a pure engineering perspective was deployed by the government, treating rivers like canals. In an assessment in 2001, the cost of the linkages was estimated at ~5,60,000 crore. Similarly, the hydropower potential of the Himalayan rivers was also mapped out purely on the basis of engineering feasibility of projects. That cost estimate for the inter-linking of rivers has never been revised, neither has a realistic estimate been made of the hydro-power potential in the hill states.
The report says, “There are no firm estimates available for running costs of the (interlinking of river) scheme, such as the cost of power required to lift water.”
It refers to the ballooning actual costs as projects not accounting for ground realities get delayed. The average cost overrun in major irrigation projects is as high as 1,382 per cent. Twenty eight out of the 151 major projects analysed by the report showed an overrun of over 1,000 per cent. Of these, nine had cost overruns of over 5,000 per cent.
“The cost overruns were relatively lower for medium projects but still unacceptably high, the average being 325 per cent,” the report says.
Asking for a revision of the way projects are analysed to begin with, the report recommends that irrigation projects should be assessed initially from ecological and social point of views as well. At the moment these two assessments are done as a follow up exercise — often leading to an underestimation of both, the time taken to get the project off the ground and the impact they shall have. The heavy engineering-mode worldview is passé, the report notes, and limits a frank assessment of the benefits from these projects.
In the case of inter-linking of rivers, the seven member expert committee that authored the report has this to say, “Further, given the topography of India and the way links are envisaged, they might totally bypass the core dryland areas of central and western India, which are located on elevations of 300+ metres above mean sea level.”
Pointing out that usually all rivers have the so-called ‘surplus’ at the same time, given that nearly all of them are dependent on the monsoon, the report says the planning for future growth in use of these waters has not been taken into account. A flawed approach In contrast to this assessment, the KenBetwa links are being reviewed for their impacts and benefits in a piece-meal way by the environment ministry — each phase of the project being assessed separately for clearance.
When it comes to hydropower dams on the upper Ganga basin, the Supreme Court is looking at their cumulative impact on people and ecology. The case came about after the Supreme Court enquired if the existing dams had exacerbated the devastation caused by the Kedarnath tragedy. A government report has categorically said they did. However, the government has since distanced itself from the report. But earlier last week, the National Green Tribunal awarded a compensation of more than ~9 crore to people who suffered damages from an ill-managed 300 MW Alaknanda Hydropower Corporation dam in Uttarakhand during the Kedarnath floods. The decision is precedent-setting.
It has invoked the principle of “No Fault Liability” available in the NGT law that has not been used before. This could provide people a recourse to seeking damages in future as well without going for a sledgehammer approach of asking a project to be shut down or the project proponents to be prosecuted under the provisions of the environment law that require criminal prosecution. The no-fault principle precludes the condition that compensation be paid only when it can be proven that damage was caused due to negligence or an intentional lapse.
This could also have large implications for the heavyengineering water projects, such as hydro-power, flood moderation dams and interlinking of rivers across the country. Avoiding a true social and environmental impact assessment at the beginning of the project could come back to haunt it in forms of direct penalties even if the projects do overcome resistance on ground by ignoring these issues during implementation phases.
The environment ministry is now on the verge of a final appraisal of the Ken-Betwa project’s first phase. The recommendations of the Mihir Shah report and the implications of the NGT orders on the Alaknanda project are unlikely to impact this assessment one way or the other.