Bangladesh is anxiously watching the recent developments on the RLP, Water Resources Minister Hafiz Uddin Ahmed told The Daily Star.

Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to inter-link the Ken and the Betwa rivers, setting the RLP in motion.

Though the Ken and the Betwa have no direct bearing on Bangladesh's water resources, similar MoUs are up for signing soon by other Indian states for linking at least 30 rivers under the RLP, which will have devastating effects on Bangladesh's ecology and macro-environment, officials said.

As India goes ahead with internal river linking under the much-hyped billion-dollar RLP, Dhaka is patiently waiting for the Indo-Bangla JRC meeting, as Hafiz Uddin said, "to take up the vital issue with our Indian counterparts."

The meeting, previously billed for August 30-31 in Dhaka, has been deferred to September 19-20, as Indian Water Resources Minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi cannot come now due to an extension of Indian parliament's session, the sources told The Daily Star last night.

Under the RLP, India plans to divert vast quantities of water from major rivers, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, threatening the livelihood of more than 100 million people downstream in Bangladesh, British daily The Guardian first reported two years back.

Up to one-third of the water flow of the Brahmaputra and other rivers could be diverted to southern Indian rivers to provide 173 billion cubic metres of water a year to Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka states for irrigation and other purposes, the Guardian report said.

Officials at the water resources ministry said Bangladesh, having 54 common rivers with India, depends on the Ganges and the Brahmaputra for 85 percent of its water requirement during the dry season, with the latter accounting for 65 percent.

The RLP will enable India to divert waters to irrigate 1,35,000 square miles of farmland and produce 34,000 megawatt of hydroelectricity.

India's steps to implement the RLP and Thursday's MoU signing between two of its states came within 10 days of President APJ Abdul Kalam's August 14 directive that the ambitious project should be implemented with a 'sense of urgency' and efforts should be made to overcome 'various hurdles' in its way.

Addressing the nation on the eve of the 59th Independence Day of India, Kalam emphasised, "Instead of thinking about inter-linking of rivers only at times of flood and drought, it is time that we implement this programme with a great sense of urgency. We need to make an effort to overcome various hurdles in our way to the implementation of this major project. I feel that it has the promise of freeing the country from the endless cycle of floods and droughts."

On August 15, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia had a closed-door meeting with senior cabinet colleagues and a JRC member to discuss the country's strategy on JRC meet. A follow-up meeting scheduled for today at the water resources ministry was however cancelled due to the last-minute deferral of the meeting.

Though the JRC is supposed to meet at least twice a year, the last meeting was held two years ago. The meeting, held in New Delhi in late 2003, dragged on for 13 hours beyond its two-day schedule as India insisted on not mentioning Bangladesh's concern over the RLP in the agreed minutes.

Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, during his visit to Bangladesh early this month, at an exclusive meeting with Khaleda Zia assured that New Delhi would not take any unilateral decision on the RLP.

Earlier on May 9, Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Veena Sikri said New Delhi would consult all the co-riparian countries if its river-linking project involved any international river.

"The project is entirely at its conceptual stage and the first focus is on its southern and peninsular rivers," she told reporters after a roundtable on 'Strategic Significance of Water Resources in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Basins' in Dhaka organised by the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies.

Sources at the water resources ministry and JRC members however said the history of Farakka Barrage still haunts their mind. One official recalled that when the then Pakistan government had first objected to the barrage plan, the Indian side assured it, saying, "Farakka Barrage is still at a conceptual level." But eventually that became a reality and Bangladesh has inherited the legacy of water scarcity in the dry season and overflowing of cross-border rivers during the monsoons due to the barrage, regretted the official.

The history of river inter-linking in India dates back to the 1970s and the issue surfaces whenever co-riparian states clash, the sources pointed out. "It is essentially based on the original plan mooted by KL Rao, the irrigation minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet," said Radha Singh, director general of the National Water Development Agency (NWDA) of India, recently.

Rao had estimated that 2,640km Ganga-Cauvery link canal would cost Rs 12,500 crore (Rs 150,000 crore at current price). Rao's plan was followed by another river-linking project in 1977, involving Rs 24,095 crore. After examination by expert committees, both the plans were shelved due either to technical difficulties or economic constraints.

But this time, under the new plan involving Rs 560,000 crore, the NWDA has identified 30 links for a feasibility study.

One such project by the erstwhile Soviet Union to divert Siberian rivers through a 2,200km canal network to feed the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers in Central Asia fell flat amidst incursion of saline water, ultimately forcing the authorities to abandon the scheme in the 1980s.

The exploitation of the Colorado river in the US is cited as a good example of river networking but, even in this case, environmentalists are concerned about the coastal ecology of the region.