Waterways body to promote river linking

The National Waterways Development Technology (Nawad Tech) has planned to hold a rally in Trichy in November to promote interlinking of waterways and also to pressurise both the state and Union governments to implement the project. While addressing reporters, AC Kamaraj, chairman of Nawad Tech, said that interlinking of rivers was absolutely essential not only to tackle flood and drought, but also to provide drinking water to the people. However, it is not a simple affair since it involves multiple problems, he said.
"A state which has surplus water will never accept that they have surplus water. Even if they do accept, they will not spare the same. The second issue is the problems it will create between states in sharing of water. States are not coming forward to bear the huge expenditure to implement the scheme. So, the Union government has to mobilise large funds.Will any state giving water to its neighbour come forward to spare such a huge amount," he asked.
However, interlinking will not help in controlling floods as rivers can draw a maximum of 40,000 cusecs of flood water but in the case of flooded rivers the inflow would be around 10 lakh cusecs. The flood control was just about 4%, he said.