Big questions linger around Ken-Betwa project

As the plan to link the two rivers gets closer to reality, the piecemeal approach to clearance leaves many doubts about its impact

The first among the ambitious interlinking of river projects, the KenBetwa linkage in Madhya Pradesh has reached its penultimate stage of clearance with the environment ministry’s forest advisory committee giving its nod. It now requires only the approval of the environment minister to move into implementation stage.

There is the Supreme Court’s Central Empowered Committee to contend with as well but the government believes that may be an easy hurdle to cross considering that the committee has asked for clarifications on some technical details and not as yet raised any major objection to the project.

The piecemeal approach permitted for clearances under the green laws has ensured that the project did not require a 360-degree appraisal of all its components cumulatively. At the moment only stage one of the project has been approved. Project developers would be at liberty to seek clearances for other stages in the future, again on a piecemeal basis.

The phase one of the river linking project required three clearances. One, under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, another under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1976, and yet another under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980. As is the case with all projects, the environment clearance was dealt with separately than the forest and wildlife clearance. Even the data presented by the project authorities for the three clearances varied, documents submitted to the government show.

Before this, the state government too had smoothly recommended the project that will submerge 4,000 hectares of the Panna National Park in the state — a popular tiger habitat where the cat population had been restored after poaching had wiped out the population.

With political leaders in the BJP government at the state and the NDA government at the Centre (including the environment minister) having already publicly voiced support for the project even before it went through expert appraisal, most observers saw the legally mandated clearances as a formality.

This meant several of the expert panels after raising fundamental concerns about different impact of the projects settled back by imposing a few additional conditions to address those concerns.

The ministry officials contend that is not the case. “Each issue raised was deliberated upon and only when solutions were found or answers provided that the appraisal committee (for environment clearance) and the advisory committee (for forest clearance) recommend the project along with additional conditions.”

But a senior retired official who was at one stage involved in appraisal of the project for its impact on forests and wildlife notes, “The writing was on the wall. We presented facts upfront but the second step was to see what one can rescue or protect if the project does go through.”

Evidence of this is the manner in which the forest and environment clearance was given to the project without reducing the height of the dam, an initial demand of ecologists to protect some of the rich Panna National Park. Instead, the authorities asked the project developers to later provide money to mitigate the damage caused by the dam and for the forest department to take over other connecting lands as compensation.

There are several hydrology and ecology experts outside the government who have at various points raised fundamental, technical and legal issues about the clearances.

But it’s the financial maths that has slipped past without a deeper scrutiny. of the Panna National Park will be submerged was the proposed cost of the project at 199495 price levels was the cost in 2015 is the cost of rehabilitation Initially, the project was proposed for ~1,998 crore at 1994-95 price levels. By the time it came up for appraisal in 2015, it had been pegged at just below ~10,000 crore but the project document does not explain if it’s at current price levels or not. Yet another document submitted to the government for clearances puts merely the cost of rehabilitation and resettlement of people and environmental management at a whopping ~5,072 crore. This was not considered as part of the costbenefit analysis while granting clearance.

Then there are the additional costs that the project would have to bear due to the conditions imposed during the clearance process. These costs too are not required to be computed for assessing the project.

But then again, the river linking project would not be the first to face problems of cost escalations, years of delay as well as failure to deliver the benefits down the last mile. Many irrigation projects have gone through this cycle and yet come up. In fact, for the KenBetwa link a proposal has been mooted to increase the share of the cost that the Centre will bear.

The fundamental justification of the project that there is ‘surplus’ water in one river to transfer to the other remains entirely unquestionable — the data for this is not available to public for scrutiny. Why? Because the hydrological data for the Ganga basin is not made public by the government.

The people would have to wait till the project culminates to see if trusting the government with large irrigation projects works this once.