s, the policy is not a formulated a policy. It just happens. The policy is
that water should not be allowed to go to the sea and it should be utilised as
much as possible by building dams and canals. We have about 4000 dams since independence and all the official reports, including the National Water Policy document, say that they suffer from project inefficiencies. Even so, not enough money is provided for maintenance of our existing water resources structure, which is put under non-plan budget. While the maintenance aspect is neglected, money is spent on construction of new dams. It is the classic case of having accepted certain problems on paper, but ignoring it in practice.
The same is the case of irrigation. The steering committee of irrigation of the Xth plan was worried about the performance of irrigation, and has emphasised the need to carry out performance evaluations. The guidelines provided in 1997, covered various aspects: irrigation performance, economic performance, environmental performance etc. The more surprising part is that there have been no performance evaluations in any of the states, and there is no feedback really. So no lessons are learnt from any of the experiences.
The only evaluations that I know of, come from civil society-two examples of these are Sripad's book on Bhakra and Mr.Mishra's work on the Koshi river project. True we have a lot to learn from these studies.
So the point I am trying to make when we say that we need to create pressure from below so that policy level changes take place. I would say that policies are there. But they are just not implemented. It is a case of neglect. Canals are not static systems. They require regular maintenance, annual maintenance. They need to be de-silted, they need to be de-weeded, and they need to be repaired. There are breaches and so on and so forth. And the cost of such work is really quite mind boggling for example, the de-silting of the eastern Koshi canal, in 2004, costed around one crore per kilometre for one canal. That is the kind of magnitude that we are talking about.