The Ken–Betwa Interlinking Project will transfer water from the Ken basin to the Betwa basin through the Daudhan dam and a 231-km canal.
Global river-linking projects have faced serious challenges, including salinity, waterlogging, ecological disruption, pollutant transfer, reduced downstream flows and misjudged water availability.
The Ken and Betwa rivers differ in climate, geology, channel form and hydrology, raising questions about how both systems will respond to sustained water transfer.
The article argues that river linking must be assessed beyond engineering promises, with greater attention to ecology, river health, livelihoods and long-term consequences.
Rivers have been both the cradle of civilisation and, at times, its destroyer. They are among the most dynamic natural systems on earth, difficult to control and never fully tame. Yet human societies have repeatedly tried to master them, because rivers are indispensable to life.
The consequences of this uneasy relationship are visible across India. Recent disasters, including the 2013 Kedarnath disaster in the Alaknanda-Mandakini river system, the 2014 Jammu and Kashmir floods in the Jhelum basin, the 2023 floods in the Beas and Sutlej basins of Himachal Pradesh, and recurrent catastrophic floods in the Brahmaputra system in Assam in 2022, 2024, 2025 and most recently 2026, show the continuing tension between human intervention and river dynamics.
One deliberate attempt to control rivers is interlinking: connecting two rivers through an artificial canal so that water can be transferred from a supposedly water-rich basin to a water-deficient one. Such projects exist in different parts of the world. India is now moving ahead with its first national-level inter-basin river-linking project, which will connect two dryland rivers: the Ken and the Betwa.
The Ken-Betwa Interlinking Project is planned to address regional water imbalance and rising water demand. It involves the construction of the Daudhan dam and a canal of about 231 km to transfer 591 million cubic metres of water from the Ken basin to the Betwa basin.
India already has some river-linking projects, including the Godavari, or Polavaram, to Krishna, or Vijayawada, link; the Telugu Ganga Project; the Kurnool-Cuddapah Canal in the southern region; and the Periyar-Vaigai Project, the oldest of these, operational since the 19th century.
These projects have worked in part because the rivers are situated in broadly similar geographical conditions and the projects are comparatively smaller in scale. But when river interlinking is attempted on a larger scale, across basins that differ in climate, geology, topography and ecology, the complexity increases sharply.
The Ken and Betwa project must therefore be understood not merely as an engineering intervention, but as an ecological and hydrological experiment in a dryland region.
Global experience offers important warnings. Some projects that initially appeared successful are now facing problems such as drought stress, increased salinity, waterlogging, water deficiencies, pollutant contamination and ecosystem loss.
China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Project has been associated with ecological loss in donor rivers, pollutant transfer, water quality deterioration, reduced downstream flows, increased salinity, seawater intrusion and wider ecological degradation. The Soviet Union’s North-to-South Water Transfer Project faced salinity and debris-related problems after reduced water volumes in the donor basin.
South Africa’s Orange River Water Transfer Project has been linked to pollutant-related contamination. Pakistan’s West-to-East Water Transfer Project has faced waterlogging in the canal system. Namibia’s Eastern National Water Carrier has caused serious ecological disruption.
In the United States, the Central Arizona Project has faced high pumping costs, underuse and drought-related water-storage problems in the donor river. The California State Water Project has seen delta ecosystem degradation, salinity intrusion and worsening drought conditions in the donor river.
A recurring problem in many such projects is the misidentification of surplus and deficit basins. Under Indian engineering practice, a river basin is considered water-surplus if its 75 per cent dependable annual river flow is expected to exceed projected annual water demand up to 2050. A basin is classified as water-deficient when it fails to meet this criterion.
But such categories are not always suitable for natural systems. As Padmini Pani, professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, has argued elsewhere, "We cannot say there is a surplus. Surplus means that the natural landscape requires that excess water." The same concern has emerged in relation to China’s South-to-North Water Transfer Project, the California State Water Project and the Central Arizona Project.
A feasibility study by Malavika Mysore, then a master’s student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences in 2009, also raised concerns about this issue in the case of the Ken-Betwa River Interlinking Project.
These experiences force a basic question: what happens to a river’s health after such large-scale alteration of a natural system?
To understand the risks, it is important to look more closely at the Ken and Betwa rivers.
Both flow through one of India’s oldest crustal blocks, the Bundelkhand Craton. They share certain geological and lithological features, including Archean crystalline rocks of the Bundelkhand Craton, largely granite-gneiss, and Proterozoic Vindhyan sedimentary formations, mainly sandstone, shale and limestone.
But there are also important differences. The Ken basin has Deccan basaltic intrusions, while the Betwa basin has Bijawar volcano-sedimentary formations. The Ken is more structurally controlled by faults and lineaments, whereas the Betwa has carved its path more directly through bedrock.
Their climates also differ slightly. The Ken basin falls under a sub-humid climate and receives around 800-1,250 mm of rainfall, about 90 per cent of it during the monsoon. The Betwa basin lies closer to the semi-arid zone, with more variable rainfall of around 700-1,200 mm, about 80 per cent of it during the southwest monsoon.
The two rivers also differ in form. The Ken is shorter, more elongated and more structurally controlled, with a higher gradient and a straighter channel. Its basin area is smaller. The Betwa is larger, with a more meandering channel in its lower reaches, a gentler slope and higher stream frequency.
These differences matter. Transferring water from the Ken during its high-flow periods could worsen its dry-season stress, especially as research indicates that the basin’s hydrology is sensitive to climate fluctuations. The project may reduce drought severity in the Betwa basin, but a sudden increase in discharge could also alter channel behaviour and river morphology.
The ecological concerns are significant. A 2017 study by Laxmi Goparaju and Firoz Ahmad of the Vindhya Ecology and Natural History Foundation, Mirzapur, and Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People noted that the proposed canal would submerge parts of the Panna Reserve Forest, threatening forest habitat and wildlife.
The same year, K D Joshi, Md A Alam, D N Jha, K Srivastava, S K Srivastava and V Kumar of the Allahabad Regional Centre of the Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute, along with A P Sharma of ICAR, Barrackpore, reported that the project could alter fish diversity and cause habitat loss in the Ken River.
Other studies have identified additional risks, including land subsidence, localised submergence, inundation and slope instability.
At the basin scale, the Daudhan dam could alter downstream sediment dynamics, affecting the Ken’s hydrology and regular water availability. The canal network may lead to habitat destruction, land submergence and waterlogging. In the Betwa basin, higher-than-usual discharge during high-flow periods could increase flood susceptibility.
From a physical standpoint, both river systems are important cratonic rivers that support ecosystems, agriculture and livelihoods across Bundelkhand. Their ability to adjust to sudden change is limited because they are structurally guided by the underlying bedrock.
Both basins also lie in drier climatic zones with highly seasonal rainfall. This raises another question: how perennial will the canal and river systems remain under changing rainfall and climate conditions?
The Betwa is already on the drier side, but the project could also make the Ken drier. The water supply to the Betwa will depend not only on how the project is executed, but also on how both rivers respond to sudden and sustained hydrological change.
Global experience suggests that the problems faced elsewhere — salinity, waterlogging, ecological disruption, pollutant transfer, reduced downstream flow and misjudged water availability — could also emerge in this river system.
The Ken and Betwa are not empty channels waiting to be engineered. They are dryland river systems that sustain ecosystems, wildlife and human livelihoods in Bundelkhand. Linking them, despite their contrasting characteristics, requires careful re-evaluation.
Across the world, there is growing recognition that rivers cannot be completely controlled or altered without environmental consequences. The ecological and hydrological impacts of dams, river regulation and inter-basin transfers have led many countries to rethink river management. Some are now investing in river restoration, dam removal, barrier removal and environmental flow restoration to preserve the natural functioning of rivers.
Thus, in an era when the world is stepping back from heavy river manipulation, India is initiating a national-level river-linking project, in a dryland region at that. The poem The Dry Salvages by TS Eliot describes the river as "a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.”
The question remains: Will India succeed in taming these rivers, or will it face the curse of the god named ‘river’?
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth