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.
