Ken-Betwa link 'threatens' forests, tigers, tribal communities, rests on faulty hydrology

By Rajiv Shah 

India's ambitious National Perspective Plan to interlink 37 rivers — at a cost exceeding Rs 10 lakh crore — has attracted fierce opposition from scientists, environmentalists, and affected communities. Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the first major project under this plan, the Ken-Betwa River Link Project (KBRLP), on December 25, 2024, that opposition has only grown louder. 

Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP), who is one of India's top environmentalists, has now argued in a comprehensive interview that the project rests on flawed hydrology, has been cleared through a compromised regulatory process, will devastate one of India's most ecologically sensitive river corridors, and will ultimately harm the very communities it claims to serve.

The idea of interlinking rivers is not new. The National Perspective Plan was formulated in 1980, with precursors stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. The concept received its most decisive political push in 2002, when then President APJ Abdul Kalam declared in his Independence Day eve address that interlinking rivers would solve India's twin problems of flood and drought. 

Days later, a Supreme Court bench directed that the scheme be completed within ten years. "There is no case for any wholesale interlinking of rivers," Thakkar says, "since it does not have the scientific basis to conclude that any given river basin is water surplus or deficit."

The government has consistently sold the Ken-Betwa link as a lifeline for the drought-prone Bundelkhand region, promising irrigation for 1.06 million hectares, drinking water for 6.2 million people, and 103 MW of power. But Thakkar says the numbers behind these claims have never been made public or subjected to independent peer review. 

"The hydrological figures are a state secret. Available information shows there is no basis to conclude that Ken has surplus water and Betwa is in deficit. It is an exercise in manipulation", he insists. 

SANDRP had demonstrated as early as 2005 that both basins were in a broadly similar hydrological situation. More recently, IIT studies have shown that the gap between so-called surplus and deficit basins across India is narrowing — undermining the entire programme's premise.

A 2007 letter from the then Collector of Panna district to the Madhya Pradesh Water Resources Department and the Planning Commission is particularly damning. The senior IAS officer calculated that if the State Irrigation Department's own 1983 master plan for the Ken basin were fully implemented, there would be no water left in the river to export. 

Her conclusion: "Ken-Betwa Project is Disaster for Ken Basin People, there is NO surplus water in Ken Basin." The Central Empowered Committee (CEC) of the Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in its official report, finding that projecting surplus water in the Ken for transfer to the Betwa, without first meeting the Ken basin's own development needs, was premature and self-defeating.

Thakkar also challenges the project's stated purpose. Buried in the Detailed Project Report is an admission that the primary objective is not to serve Bundelkhand at all, but to transfer water to the upper Betwa basin districts of Raisen and Vidisha — which lie outside Bundelkhand. 

"The Ken-Betwa Project actually facilitates the export of water from drought-prone Bundelkhand to outside Bundelkhand," he says. Most of Bundelkhand receives over 900 mm of annual rainfall — enough, if harvested locally, to meet water needs without large infrastructure or displacement.

The regulatory history of the project is equally troubling. The Expert Appraisal Committee on River Valley Projects refused to clear the project across four consecutive meetings. The then Water Resources Minister reportedly threatened to sit on dharna if clearance was withheld. The Ministry of Environment reconstituted the EAC with a new chairman, SK Jain, who cleared the project at his committee's very first meeting in December 2016 — setting aside every objection the previous committee had raised. 

Within three months, Jain was appointed Director General of NWDA, the agency whose project his committee had just approved. The Forest Advisory Committee and the CEC wrote in official records that the project ideally should not have been cleared. The CEC report has never been formally considered by the Supreme Court. "The whole clearance process has been totally compromised at each step of the way," Thakkar says.

The ecological consequences are severe. The proposed Daudhan dam will submerge 6,017 hectares of forest inside the Panna Tiger Reserve, bifurcating a protected landscape home to tigers, leopards, gharials, vultures, and numerous other endangered species. The Forest Advisory Committee recorded that the project requires felling 46 lakh trees of girth greater than 20 cm from forest areas alone. 

Downstream, the Ken Gharial Sanctuary faces destruction: gharials depend on silt-bearing monsoon flows for their breeding habitat, but the reservoir will trap silt before it can reach them. And just downstream of the dam site, Raneh Falls — a geological wonder that Thakkar describes as India's own mini Grand Canyon — faces permanent destruction as flows are drastically curtailed. The CEC report acknowledged the project would result in the "disruption and disappearance of millions of years of evolution" along the Ken's gorges, caves and cliffs.

Behind all of this lies what Thakkar sees as a deeper institutional failure. The Central Water Commission, India's apex water body, has functioned more as a lobby for large dams than as an independent technical institution, systematically crowding out investment in local water systems and groundwater recharge. 

India's groundwater — which accounts for over 90 per cent of all additional water the country has used in the past four and a half decades — is fast approaching crisis, a trajectory the CWC has done nothing to arrest. Thakkar calls for independent agencies to monitor rivers, forecast floods, and regulate dam safety, insulated from the conflicts of interest that have historically allowed projects like Ken-Betwa to proceed.

"In the era of climate change," he concludes, "high-impact projects like large dams are going to be greater liabilities as they destroy society's remaining capacity to adapt. Will better sense prevail? It's still not too late."