The Last Gasp

of opportunity was, however, also a period of intense competition. Cotton’s river inter-linking scheme was double edged; it had to draw capital investments for navigation and irrigation schemes while simultaneously starving the same for the railways, which was then being touted as the most viable mode for mass transport in India. Cotton, in effect, wanted river navigation to trump railway lines. This explains why his Report on the Mahanuddy contained several diatribes against the railways, which he unhesitatingly declaimed was an “inferior mode of conveyance”.4 In the subsequent years, Cotton’s reputation was all but eclipsed. Not only did the proponents for the railways triumph, but the Orissa scheme and several others, whose construction Cotton had pushed for, had turned into sordid financial disasters.5 In fact, by the time Arthur Cotton left India, he was a much defeated and broken man. The idea for inter-linking rivers in India, however, seems to have been firmly planted. In the 1960s K L Rao, the then union minister of state for power and irrigation, spoke of linking the Ganga with the Cauvery through a 2,640 km long canal. By the 1970s, the plan was reworked as a ‘national river grid’ by which the surplus waters of the Ganga and Brahmaputra were to be diverted to the central and southern states. Earlier, one Captain Dastur, an air pilot, proposed that a 4,200 km long Himalayan canal and 9,300 km long southern canal be linked up at Delhi and Patna. Captain Dastur’s proposal was popularly referred to as the Garland Canal.6 The government of India subsequently set up the National Commission for Integrated Water Resources Development Plan (NCIWRDP) to assess these grand schemes. In their report, submitted in 1999, the NCIWRDP concluded that K L Rao’s proposal was “very costly and lower cost alternatives were available”. The commission was even more curt about Captain Dastur’s proposal, which was dismissed as being “prima facie impractical”.7 Oddly enough, the idea for inter-linking India’s rivers, despite its repeated dismissal by expert opinion, seems to be merely shelved rather than killed. On October 31, 2002, the Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Kirpal ‘suggested’ that the government take up the plan for linking rivers. This set off an immediate chain reaction. By November, the central government claimed that feasibility studies for six of the peninsula links were ready and by December 16 of the same year appointed a Task Force under the chairmanship of Suresh Prabhu to prepare and outline an action plan for implementing the project.8 Those who are good at controlling water give it the best opportunity to flow away, those who are good at controlling people give them plenty of chance to talk. – Chia Jang, a great Han Engineer (Quoted in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol 4, Part III, Cambridge, 1971)