Sreelatha Menon: Reaping the rivers

EAR TO THE GROUND

The government's move to declare some rivers as national assets to exploit their potential defies logic.

The Government of India wants to declare some rivers as national assets as it feels that the states are not equipped to exploit their potential enough. Union Minister for Water Resources Saifuddin Soz said this week that the proposal, which has already been examined by a Group of Ministers headed by the Union agriculture minister, is to go before the Cabinet soon.

The rivers which are to be given this special status are the ones associated with international treaties and have national dimensions. This might include almost all Himalayan snow-fed rivers, like the Ganges, Yamuna and Teesta.

Rivers are a state subject, but this hurdle would be crossed by the Centre by declaring its control not on the entire stretch of the river but on portions of it. Soz says these would be "national projects" on rivers which would still belong to the states.

Whether states would accept it with a smile is yet to be seen. But the Centre does not seem to be worried for the moment. It says the intent is noble and for the national good. But the question is whether national good is the same as good for the people. Second, it is hardly true that the states have not been exploiting the potential of their rivers. Soz gives the examples of two rivers "" Yamuna and Teesta "" to justify the plan. The Yamuna, he says, has been with the states but they failed to keep it clean, or to use it for drinking water or generating hydel power.

Soz could not be more misinformed. In the last 30 years, the people of Delhi, including Soz and his Cabinet colleagues, have been able to tap even the last drop available from the river. On its way to Delhi, Haryana's farmers have been able to irrigate the fields from the Yamuna water, while the state has been generating power too.

In fact, what flows in Delhi, and this has been said millions of time by environment activists, is nothing but water from all the toilets and drains of Delhi.

What magic formula does the Centre have to clean this cesspool or to generate hydel power from this? The strategies being suggested to localise sewage treatment and to avoid big treatment plants have never been heeded. Soz is not even talking of it and the matter is not in his hands anyway.

As for the Teesta, the Centre's logic of exploiting its potential would have made sense if the Sikkim government had not been accused of already overdoing this exploitation.

Already, 30-odd hydel power projects are taking the life out of the river, even as the surrounding mountains are being dynamited.

What more potential does the Centre see? In the Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, the Son river is being exploited for sand mining. The mountains around have already been razed for rocks. After another 20 years, the river may disappear just as the mountains around it have almost vanished.

The Centre has not set up a group of ministers to review the ongoing exploitation of rivers. Instead, it wants to join the forces that are raping the rivers of this country.