The Indian Supreme Court Promotes Interlinking of India's Rivers: Judicial Overreach?

摘要

The much-discussed and oft-criticized Indian interlinking of rivers (ILR) project, initiated on its own motion by the Supreme Court of India (SC), will involve connecting 37 rivers in India through 30 links and 36 dams. The SC seems to have been motivated by concerns about the disparate regional availability of water in India: while parts of India are host to perennial rivers that frequently flood, other parts have access to surface freshwater resources only during the monsoon and are frequently afflicted by droughts. In this context, the idea of linking India's rivers to divert waters from areas with a surplus to areas of scarcity seems intuitively desirable. In the process, if it is possible to generate 30,000 megawatts (MW) of cheap hydropower, to supply drinking water to 101 districts and five metropolises, and to irrigate 34 million hectares, all the better.