India's Ambitious River-Linking Project: Engineering Marvel or Ecological Disaster?

The race for fresh water in India is on, but at what cost?

Imagine redirecting the flow of nature itself. That's exactly what India plans to do with its unprecedented river-linking project, which aims to manually connect several of India’s river systems into a mega water grid spanning the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal.

The plan is to interlink 37 Himalayan and peninsular rivers to redistribute an estimated 200 billion cubic meters of water annually from areas with surplus river basins to areas of deficit across the country. If successful, this interlinking will not only ensure water access across the country, but also irrigate tens of millions of hectares of farmland and boost India’s hydroelectric power generation. 

This massive undertaking clocks in at $168 Billion USD and promises to be an engineering feat unlike anything the world has ever seen before. The back to basics supply and demand redistribution logic is a seemingly elegant solution to India's chronic water distribution problems that have plagued the country for decades. 

However, beneath this glossy surface of progress lies a darker reality. The true cost of this project could be catastrophic, with far-reaching consequences for the landscape, wildlife, and millions of people, not to mention the weather. Yes, redirecting rivers can change India’s weather. 

But that’s not all. In order to pull this project off, you would need to know which rivers are in surplus and which are in deficit to correctly redirect water from areas of flooding to areas of drought. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. This information, river water flow data, is a state secret in India and no one really knows why. Not even experts like Dr. Tejasvi Chauhan, a water engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry who I had the pleasure of interviewing. He is also the first author of this study which details how manual river-linking will alter India’s weather patterns, particularly the monsoon season. 

Dr. Chauhan explained:

• How redirecting rivers can change the weather

• Why he thinks water flow data is a state secret

• The potentially devastating impacts manual river-interlinking will have on the environment, weather, land, people and wildlife

• Potential alternative solutions to river-linking

But before we get to how redirecting rivers can change the weather, it’s important to note that this river-linking project is not new. In fact this plan is nearly 100 years in the making. 

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