Water comservation big tym

Apart from the massive displacement of people that such projects will bring about, says activist Himanshu Thakkar, they also threaten to obstruct the natural ecology of rivers.

Former Planning Commission member, Mihir Shah noted in a critique of India’s river-interlinking projects in the Economic and Political Weekly that in the Krishna river basin water storage in major and medium reservoirs has reached total water yield with virtually no water going into the sea in low rainfall years.

Since the Ganga basin’s topography is flat, building dams would not substantially add to river flows and these dams could threaten the forests of the Himalayas and impact the functioning of the monsoon system.

Climate change is another concern. In interlinking systems, it is assumed that the donor basin has surplus water that can be made available to the recipient basin.

“If in future, this basic assumption goes haywire for any system, wherein our perennial systems – mostly Himalayan – don’t retain the same character of being donor basins, then the whole concept goes for a toss. This will happen if the glaciers don’t sustain their glacier mass due to climate change,” explained A. Gossain, Professor at IIT Delhi who researches Indian water resources.

Professor Gossain however notes that alternatives such as curbing demand by efficient utilisation of existing water resources should be prioritised before making big-ticket investments in river interlinking.

Questions of storage needn’t always be seen in the light of big dams, adds Shashi Shekhar, Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources. The judicious use of canal water, growing crops that were appropriate to a region, encouraging drip irrigation and reviving traditional systems such as the use of tanks are also as important as creating new storage.

“Drought prone systems have a traditional network of tanks that were always employed for harnessing water during should be prioritised before making big-ticket investments in river interlinking.
The old city of Jodhpur has over 200 stepwells and they were built from around the 6th century onward as part of an incredibly sophisticated water architecture,” he explains. During the little rain that the region receives between June and September water is diverted from canals built on the hilly outskirts of the city to man-made tanks or talabs.

It then seeps into the ground, raising the water table and recharging an intricate network of aquifers that were built deep, with steps narrowing down to the well to minimise the water that could evaporate.

All that changed after 1996, when the Indira Gandhi canal brought water from the Sutlej River in Punjab and the government started supplying piped water to households. “Earlier people had to collect water from the stepwells with buckets but once piped water came there was suddenly a surfeit and then people no longer cared. They started using the stepwells to just dump garbage,” says Dhananjaya Singh, whose family owns a hotel in Jodhpur and is involved in the restoration of the Toor ji ka jhalra, another stepwell in the old city.