Magsaysay award winner Rajendra Singh, hailed as the 'waterman of India', Friday favoured a community-driven decentralized water management rather than building large dams.
"People of our Rajasthan worked by integrating engineering and technique, science and community. Today, the engineer of India never sits and talks to a scientist.
He does not like to know about the character of underground aquifers. He is into his engineering. That's why whatever government dams have been built, they have killed rivers....
You have to stop building these large dams and do community driven decentralized water management," he said, speaking at the Hyderabad Literary Festival here.
Singh stressed on the need to improve the rivers instead of linking them, as planned by the governnment, to treat increasing inundation and drought.
Singh said 'Mission Kakatiya' (rejuvenation of tanks and other water bodies) programme of Telangana and should be implemented by the community and not by contractors and companies, who have got into it, as "it is all going towards corruption," he said.
"Corruption would be known if community works on a task, but corruption by contractors would not be known," he said.
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