February 2025: “Why a mega river-linking plan has sparked massive protests in India,” BBC.

India’s long-planned “river interlinking project” would create new dams and aqueducts throughout the country to move water from rivers that are judged to have “excess” water into water-scarce areas. As the government starts to implement the first phase of the project, it is facing opposition from villagers who will be displaced by the new reservoir and aqueduct.

Context: The practice of moving water from where it is to where we want to use it goes back to the dawn of human civilization, but the scale of movement – in both distance and water volume – increased dramatically in the twentieth century. Projects like the Los Angeles Aqueduct (215 miles, completed 1913), the Central Arizona Project (336 miles, 1993), and China’s South-North Water Transfer Project (in progress, about 2000 miles already completed) have changed how we think about water availability, and have allowed cities and farms to far outgrow their local water supplies. The environmental and social impacts of these mega-projects can be massive (see Chapter 9). In the US, the era of aqueduct construction is largely over, but the same is not true in India and other developing countries.