What is the issue?
- Union government is planning for a large scale river linking plan.
- Several issues must be sorted out first before the plan is taken up.
What is the river linking plan about?
- The Union government is all set to begin work on an estimated $87 billion plan to connect around 60 of India’s largest rivers.
- Work is now set to link the Betwa and Ken rivers which pass through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh
- Once complete, it is expected to help end farmers’ dependence on fickle monsoon rains, bring millions of hectares of cultivable land under irrigation.
- It will also help generate thousands of megawatts of electricity.
What are the challenges for the project?
- Constitutional Mandate -Water is listed as entry 17 in List II of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution.
- While the government has initiated discussions to bring the subject under the concurrent list, it may not be an easy task to achieve.
- If there are changes in the political dispensation in various States, the government in a State that is upstream may refuse to share water with downstream States.
- Water resource accounts - This will provide an accounting framework that enables the integration of specialised physical resource sector data with other information on the economics of water supply.
- India is technically poor with respect to data related to the water sector.
- Unlike other countries, the Central Statistics Office has neither attempted nor funded studies to gather data on water tables at an all-India or State level.
- The absence of a well-informed water policy reflects a knowledge governance gap.
- Agricultural commitment-There is a dearth of studies in the Indian context unlike other countries addressing the water resource gap by analysing water flows embodied in agriculture products.
- At a subnational scale, Virtual Water flows are not consistent with relative water scarcity.
What needs to be done?
- The government should pay more attention to its ‘more crop per drop’ mission, and to what extent Indian agriculture follows this practice.
- Water resource accounting makes it possible to capture direct, indirect and induced water demand in the process of economic production.
- It need to be carried out at all the major crops at subnational levels is a must for efficient planning of a scarce resource such as water.
- A full-fledged architecture to solve water sharing disputes between states is needed.
Source: The Hindu
