Sustainable Development of Water Resources: Performance Appraisal of Dams

The word sustainability has became fashionable yet is important for proper development. Government has so far built 4291 dams including 695 under construction. Majority of these were built at post independent India at staggering cost of Rs. 231386 crores, creating live storage capacity of 173.733 KM accounting to only 45% of the planned. No one has evaluated the sustainability of such adventurous exercise. Perhaps the book, for the first time, bring out a case study on sustainability of a large dam in India. The findings are interesting and useful and give good feedback to policy makers and implementing agencies. This answers to many of the following questions having direct bearing on sustainability: Do we want to save thousands of crores of public money spent on dams? Do we want to prevent permanent loss of arable land due to environmental issue such as waterlogging, salinisation and alkalinisation? Do we want to save health of people in command area due to pesticide poisoning and vector born diseases? Do we want to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor? Do we want to sustain level of water potential created over a long period of time? This book is based on mostly published secondary source but whenever necessary primary data is also used. This will be of immense use to practicing managers, environmental enthusiasts, policy makers, NGO’s and engineers.