A huge, costly mistake The Ken-Betwa project will take a tremendous toll on the ecosystem, and its benefits are not certain

Sunny Sebastian mergence area includes a critically important section of the Panna Tiger A river project which remained a Reserve. The Reserve is considered pipe dream for more than three de- as a shining example of conservation cades after it was first mooted may after it successfully improved the tig- now become a reality. Last month, er and vulture populations. Echoing Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and the concerns of environmentalists, the Centre signed a tripartite agree- Congress president Sonia Gandhi ment to transfer “surplus” water wrote to Union Environment Minis- from the Ken basin in M.P. to the ter Prakash Javadekar asking him not “deficit” Betwa basin in U.P. The Ken- to implement the project. She said Betwa project is part of the national “around 40% of the area of the tiger river linking project which proposes reserve will be irretrievably dam- to connect 14 Himalayan and 16 pe- aged” if the project is implemented. ninsular rivers with 30 canals and Also, the project may destroy about 3,000 reservoirs in order to irrigate 7.2 lakh trees. South Asia Network on 87 million hectares of land. It has the Dams, River and People convener Hi- status of a national project, as the manshu Thakkar fears that this will Centre will contribute 90% of the affect rainfall in the already parched cost. It is India’s first river linking region. project and will take eight years to complete. Cost and benefit First mooted in the 1980s, the Ken- The claims of Ken having surplus wa- Betwa project was taken up seriously ter may be unrealistic as the river is only during former Prime Minister not perennial — in the past some- Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s regime. Since times, it has slowed to a trickle. then, former Union Water Resources Another difficulty will be that the Ken Minister Uma Bharti has been the flows 60-70 feet lower than the Betwa torch-bearer of the project. The pro- and at least 30% of the 103 MW pow- ject, the government says, will en- er generated will be used for pump- hance the irrigation potential of the ing the water up. The Union Ministry water-starved Bundelkhand region in and the National Water Development U.P. and M.P., facilitate groundwater Agency, which is entrusted with the recharge and reduce the occurrence project, have some issues to sort out. of floods. According to the Memoran- These include getting clearance from dum of Agreement signed, the to-be- the Central Empowered Committee built Daudhan dam is expected to ir- of the Supreme Court, which had rigate nearly 6,00,000 hectares in raised concerns about the project. four districts in M.P. and 2,51,000 The cost-benefits calculations of the hectares in four districts in U.P. and project also don’t take into consider- provide drinking water supply to 41 ation the environmental and social lakh people in M.P. and 21 lakh in U.P. impacts. Thus, the benefits do not seem certain and are far outweighed Environmental concerns by the costs on the environment. However, the excitement of planners It is surprising that alternatives and politicians about this project, such as water-conservation and wa- which costs ₹37,611 crore (2018 fi- ter-harvesting methods without gure), is reportedly missing on the building a dam haven’t been serious- ground. The people of the region ly considered in the region. Large- who are going to be affected by the scale solutions such as this are not al- project seem resigned to their fate. In ways viable and the best. Given the public hearings held in the past, they serious doubts about the benefits of were divided on political lines and al- the project and the monumental toll so worried about the loss of the eco- that it would have on the ecosystem, system and displacement. including on carefully preserved wil- The project was on the drawing dlife, the Ken-Betwa project seems board for years mainly due to envi- like a huge, costly mistake. ronmental concerns. Of the 12,500 hectares of land to get submerged by Sunny Sebastian is a former Vice-Chancellor the project, more than 9,000 ha are and member, Rajasthan State Board for categorised as forest land. The sub- Wildlife