Agreements & MOUs - The Ganga: Water Use in the Indian Subcontinent - page 178

Under Article IX, the JRC was entrusted with studying the most economic and
feasible schemes for augmentation of dry-season flow, proposed, or to be proposed,
by either government and with submitting its recommendations to the two gov-
ernments within three years. Accordingly, the proposals were submitted by two
sides and considered by the JRC, but no consensus could be reached in spite of
several exchange of data etc. and no final recommendation could be made to the
governments.
The two proposals for augmentation of the discharge at Farakka made by the two
governments were as under.
India's Proposal
India's proposal comprised the following:
(i) Construction of a barrage across the Brahmaputra at Jogigopa in Assam, to be
about 2.40 km long, i.e., longer than Farakka Barrage;
(ii) Construction of a link canal, about 320 km long, joining the Brahmaputra,
upstream of the proposed barrage at Jogigopa and the Ganga, upstream of the
barrage at Farakka of a capacity of about 2,830 cumecs, or 100,000 cusecs, of
the size of 2,750 metre width and 9.0 metre depth.
(iii) Construction of three dams - one across the Dihang, a tributary of the
Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh, and the other over the Subansiri in Assam
and the third over the Barak in Mizoram.
The Indian proposal, outlined in Fig. 10.8, aimed at water transfer from the
Brahmaputra basin to that of the Ganga, i.e., from a surplus to a deficit river to
augment the flow of the latter in dry season. The main barrage was proposed to
be constructed at Jogigopa in Assam, about 110 km downstream of Guwahati, the
Assam capital, where the river is narrow and the banks are rocky and stable. The link
canal was to stretch over 215 km in India, i.e., about two-thirds of its total length
and over 105 km in Bangladesh, i.e., about one-third of its total length. The canal
would run over about 45,000 acres of land in India and 20,000 acres in Bangladesh,
to become the largest man-made canal in the world.
Indian proposal provided for augmentation of the Brahmaputra discharge in
the dry season. Three storage reservoirs were proposed across three rivers in
India's north-eastern provinces - Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram. The
Brahmaputra after flowing east through China for more than half of its length, takes
a sharp southward turn and enters Arunachal Pradesh with a steep downward gradi-
ent of about 2.29 km out of 230 km (1:140) approximately. The proposal included
construction of a rock-fill dam of about 260 mheight, across the Dihang on its right
with a gross storage capacity of about 32,500 million M 3 (MCM), almost equal to
that of the largest reservoir in the USA. It would augment the Brahmaputra flow in
the dry season by 1,700-3,400 cumecs. A hydro-electric power station below the