Tuesday, September 20, 2005

My buddy Raju had a post on the controversial river interlinking project in India. As a water resources engineer, I find the prospect of engineering a solution to solve flooding and drought problems very exciting. However, there are a lot of pros and cons to the issue. The knee-jerk environmental activist response is to criticize the government, question the science and conclude that the public is in for yet another ride. However, this post is not about the socio-economic impacts of this project. I would limit myself to the engineering aspects of this project.

Firstly, does anyone have access to a hydrologic study presenting more details on this project ? I am interested in the following issues :

1. Where are the major links / Storage basins/Reservoirs to be constructed ?
2. What kind of hydraulic / hydrologic modeling has been done to analyze the impact of river diversion ?
3. What about sediment transport / silt buildup analysis ?
4. How about impacts to the ecosystem ?

If anyone can provide me with some documentation / details, that would be just great.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

yeah most often the "environmental activists" talk about displaced people, rehabilitation and not about the benefits. Celebrities (you know who) lend their names to these activities and then its a media circus.

J

inqztiv said...

I never said that you were an environmentalist. Reread my post if you think so. I was more interested in the engineering aspects as those are things I can understand and quantify easily (in a relative sense) as opposed to the social impacts which are lot more complex.

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