Ken-Betwa river interlinking project: The first river interlinking project in the country, for which a memorandum of understanding

was signed, proposed inter-linking of Ken and Betwa rivers by diversion of water from the Ken basin to the Betwa basin through a 231.45-km concrete-lined canal. The Ken-Betwa Link Project envisages a 73.80 m high Daudhan dam across the Ken, about 2.5 km upstream of existing Gangau Weir on the border of Chhattarpur-Panna districts in Madhya Pradesh. Two powerhouses, one at the foot of the dam and other at the end of a 2-km tunnel, are also proposed to generate power.

Chief Justice S H Kapadia

river interlinking project: The river interlinking project was the brainchild of the NDA government and in October 2002, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had formed a task force to get the project going against the backdrop of the acute drought that year. The task force had submitted a report recommending division of the project into two the Peninsular component and the Himalayan component.

The Peninsular component involving the rivers in southern India envisaged developing a Southern Water Grid with 16 linkages. This component included diversion of the surplus waters of the Mahanadi and Godavari to the Pennar, Krishna, Vaigai and Cauvery.
The task force had also mooted the diversion of the west-flowing rivers of Kerala and Karnataka to the east, the interlinking of small rivers that flow along the west coast, south of Tapi and north of Mumbai and interlinking of the southern tributaries of the river Yamuna. The Himalayan component envisaged building storage reservoirs on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra and their main tributaries both in India and Nepal in order to conserve the waters during the monsoon for irrigation and generation of hydro-power, besides checking floods. The task force had identified 14 links including Kosi-Ghagra, Kosi-Mech, Ghagra-Yamuna, Gandak-Ganga, Yamuna-Rajasthan, Rajasthan-Sabarmati, Sarda-Yamuna, Farakka-Sunderbans, Brahmaputra-Ganga, Subernarekha-Mahanadi, and Ganga-Damodar-Subernarekha. The task force had also concluded that the linking of rivers in the country would raise the irrigation potential to 160 million hectares for all types of crops by 2050, compared to a maximum of about 140 million hectares that could be generated through conventional sources of irrigation.