Much to lose for Bundelkhand when Ken meets Betwa

Union Environment Minister Anil Dave on January 5 reportedly told a meeting of non-official members of statutory bodies like Expert Appraisal Committees and Forest Advisory Committee, “How can we hold up development and not fulfil the needs of the poor for the sake of birds and animals?” This is a shocking statement to come from a minister whose mandate is to protect the environment. No less disturbingly, as environment minister, Dave has repeatedly advocated pushing the Ken Betwa River Link Project (KBLRP) as a pilot scheme, when the project did not have any of the final clearances from his own ministry. Intriguingly, on August 12, 2010, while participating in a debate in Rajya Sabha, Dave had taken a diametrically opposite view on mega dams. He said: “The water available for dams upstream is decreasing, the dams are unable to generate claimed power, in the downstream the rivers are dying, these are huge changes. If there is an honest assessment of this, truth will come out… but for God’s sake do not get such assessments done by bureaucrats.”

For all the hyperbole about the KBRLP, the most essential information — how much water is there in Ken or Betwa rivers — remains a state secret. It is not in the public domain. As a member of the erstwhile committee on Inter Linking of Rivers set up by the Ministry of Water Resources, I sought information to know if Ken is surplus and Betwa is deficit in water. The reply that came was the information cannot be divulged even to the official expert committee, since Ken-Betwa is part of the Ganga basin which is an international basin. So there is no way to confirm the government claim that Ken has surplus water and Betwa is deficit in water availability. No independent review of this claim has been done ever. However, available information shows that the whole exercise of proving the government claim is an exercise in manipulation to achieve the pre-decided objective. While groundwater remains India’s water lifeline, NWDA’s (National Water Development Agency) hydrological assessments do not take into account the groundwater-surface flow dynamics at all.

The Environment Minister should know that forests are not only for “bird and animals” but are the nurturers of rivers. If 10,500 hectares of the Panna Tiger Reserve in the Ken river catchment is destroyed by the project as mentioned in the minutes of the National Board of Wildlife meeting in August 2016, it will have a huge impact on the hydrology of the river. But sadly, the shoddily done Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) of Ken-Betwa project by the Agriculture Finance Corporation Limited does not even mention this. 

There is a widely prevalent notion that KBRLP is for the benefit of the Bundelkhand area. Let’s get this misconception cleared right in the beginning. The official executive summary of the Detailed Project Report of KBLRP on NWDA website says: “The main objective of the Ken-Betwa link project is to make available water to water deficit areas of upper Betwa basin through substitution from the surplus waters of Ken basin.” The Upper Betwa basin (Raisen and Vidisha districts of MP) is not in Bundelkhand. So the KBLRP is facilitating export of water from drought-prone Bundelkhand to areas outside Bundelkhand, which, in fact is well endowed with over 900 mm of average annual rainfall. 

The DPR further says that about a third of the surplus water will be utilised for “enroute irrigation of 0.60 lakh hectares (ha) in the districts of Tikamgarh and Chhatarpur of MP and Mahoba and Jhansi of UP”. The claim in the minutes of Expert Appraisal Committee meeting of December 30, 2016, that “it is proposed to provide irrigation facility in 6,35,661 hectares of area in Panna, Chhatarpur, Tikamgarh districts of Madhya Pradesh and Banda, Mahoba and Jhansi districts in Uttar Pradesh” needs to be put in context here. Firstly, this claim is far in excess of what the presumed surplus water can irrigate. Moreover, a total of 5.15 lakh ha of cultivable lands in these six districts is projected to benefit constituting about 12.5 per cent of total cultivable land of Bundelkhand. So, at least 87.5 per cent of cultivable land of Bundelkhand will not get any water from the KBLRP. A significant part of the projected benefit area (Banda and other districts) is already irrigated. So less than 10 per cent of cultivable land of Bundelkhand is to benefit and even for this, there are much better options available as exemplified by a number of Planning Commission and civil society initiatives.

The whole exercise of securing statutory environment, forest and wildlife clearances for this project was seriously compromised at each step of the way from impact assessment, public consultations appraisal, to governance.

So much so that Union Water Resources Minister Uma Bharati publicly threatened the regulators that if they do not clear the project, she will go on fast. When the Expert Appraisal Committee, in its meeting on December 30, 2016, decided to recommend environment clearance to the project, it did so after a shoddy EIA, public consultation process that involved serious violations, and ignoring the NBWL condition that the non essential power component needs to be shifted out of the protected area.

This decision went against the decisions of five earlier EAC meetings. It ignored the legal requirement that projects on Ganga river or its tributaries should be cleared by the District, State and National Level Ganga River Conservation Authorities as per the Government of India Ganga notification of October 7, 2016. Interestingly, the same Water Resources Minister called KBRLP as “model link project”. The compromised clearance process makes the progress legally untenable.

Why then is the project being pushed? As a top official in Ministry of Water Resources told us last month, it is going to be about the Rs 30,000 crore project, if nothing else. There is a strong contractor-politician-bureaucrat-engineer-consultant nexus that sees huge opportunities in a project which involves so much money, he told us. We hope the legal institutions see through all this and would stop this madness.

Himanshu Thakkar is the coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers, and People