India dusts down grandiose plans to link its great rivers to combat drought and floods

A plan dating from the 1970s to build a gigantic system of canals linking India's rivers in an effort to break the nation's debilitating pattern of drought and flood has been given new impetus by the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

He told parliament that the government saw the scheme as a permanent solution to India's water crises, which could "change the destiny of the country". Getting the money would be no problem, he said. The issue was spending it properly.

His remarks are an endorsement of ambitious plans, drawn up by India's National Water Development Agency, for a network of canals, dams and reservoirs that would transfer water from India's wettest areas to its driest.

The idea, which has been on the drawing board in India for three decades, partly represents an attempt to end the feuding between India's states over access to water, aggravated by its punishing climatic conditions – from extreme heat to monsoons, cyclones and floods. A legal battle has been raging in the south between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Cauvery river.

Last month India's Water Resources Minister, Arjan Chanan Sethi, said under the plan surplus water from rivers starting in the Himalayan mountains, which flow along most parts of eastern India, would be diverted to the peninsular river system in the south.

"When surplus waters from rivers in eastern India get diverted to deficit areas down in the south and in the north, it would ease the floods as well as solve the drought problem across the country," he said.

At least one billion rupees (£12.6m) has already been spent on the preliminary studies. However, the scheme's critics point out that many obstacles lie in its path – from funding, to displacing of people, and the acquisition of land.

Plans to link India's vast and ancient rivers, whose waters are considered sacred and spiritually purifying by Hindus, were first drawn up in 1972 when India was casting around for a solution to a problem that was causing misery to many millions each year, as well as severe economic damage.

The problem has less to do with a lack of water than uneven distribution. Nearly two thirds of India's water resources flow from the Himalayas into the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins in the east, where floods are endemic.

At the same time, large parts of the country – including Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu – are parched. This year they are enduring a drought that is so severe that farmers have been committing suicide and a handful of people have died from starvation, although the latter is because of a break-down in India's food distribution systems. In August, the Minister of Farming, Ajit Singh, said that the country's drought was the worst in 15 years.

The position is expected to worsen over the years as India tries to grow more food to feed its population, which has already crossed the one billion mark and increases by the thousands every day.

In 1986, the Ministry of Water Resources scaled down the 1972 river-linking plan, but it remains an enormous project that would require at least 35 years to build. Estimates of the cost run into many billions of pounds.

Mr Vajpayee's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, said this month that the river-linking project should go ahead urgently. According to party documents, the plans include reservoirs on the main tributaries of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra in north-eastern India and neighbouring Nepal and Bhutan.