Kamath to head finance panel

ICICI Bank chief K V Kamath has been appointed as the head of the sub-group to recommend the financing structure for the proposed Rs 5,60,000 crore (Rs 5,600 billion) project to link six major river basins in the country.

The IIM, Ahmedabad has been asked to work on a suitable management structure to execute the project -- like, say, the National Highways Authority of India which is executing the ambitious roadways project -- and ex-WWF chief Samar Singh has been asked to head the sub-group to study the project's impact on the country's forest land.

Chairman of the task force on linking of rivers Suresh Prabhu is reticent about naming the head of the third sub-group, on rehabilitation and resettlement -- all he says is that the points of view of NGOs, like Medha Patkar for instance, will certainly have to be taken on board if the project is to succeed.

While no details have even been drawn up on how much land would need to be used to construct the canals to link the river basins, or how many people would be displaced, or indeed even how much the project would actually cost, Prabhu's confident of getting together some kind of structure within the next year or so.

Under a Supreme Court order, he has to report to the court with a progress report every three months, and the project has to be ready by 2016.

"Various countries like the US and France have linked basins before, and China is currently linking two major rivers in the north and the south -- Yangtse and the Yellow River -- so there are enough examples to demonstrate how these projects are executed and financed. We've just got to draw on the best practices," says Prabhu.

The benefits, says Prabhu, are tremendous. Apart from the navigational benefits, the Himalayan portion of the project will provide additional irrigation of 22 million hectares, and linking flood-prone areas of the north-east to the Ganges for instance, will provide flood control and also augment water flows at Farakka to flush the Calcutta port.

At least 34,000 MW of hydro generating capacity will also be created primarily in the Himalayan region.

Besides, according to Prabhu, significant work has been done in India as well on the project -- in the 19th century, an Englishman called Scott also studied the viability of such a project, and K L Rao who was Nehru's irrigation minister also studied this from the irrigation point of view.

Rao's proposal, of course, was unviable since it needed 5000 MW of power just to lift the water up in the Deccan Plateau.

Prabhu's project, by contrast, does not require any lifting of water, rivers flow down through gravity, and any linking that's done will use this principle as well.

While there has been a lot of opposition to his project already, and a lot more is certain from the anti-dam lobby since the project will also see the creation of 34,000 MW of hydel power capacity, Prabhu's feels this can be contained.

"Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has already written to her chief ministers asking them to support the project," says Prabhu who plans to meet the chief ministers of each state within the next two months.

"In June or July, we'll convene a meeting held by the PM where all CMs will be invited." As for the states' differences over water-sharing, Prabhu feels somewhat optimistically, that a solution could lie in preserving the present status quo in terms of how much water each state gets right now.

That, of course, is a major assumption, since it is by no means certain that a water-surplus area, like say, Orissa, will want its surplus water to go to, say, Andhra Pradesh.