New Delhi, September 15: The chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh (Yogi Adityanath), Uttarakhand (Pushkar Singh Dhami), Himachal Pradesh (Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu), Rajasthan (Bhajan Lal Sharma), Delhi (Rekha Gupta) and Haryana (Nayab Singh Saini) signed an agreement on Tuesday to build the Kishau Multipurpose Project, a dam on the Tons river that has been under discussion for more than three decades.
The agreement was signed in the presence of union home minister Amit Shah and union Jal Shakti minister C.R. Patil. Shah said it was the tenth water dispute resolved since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, following earlier agreements on the Lakhwar, Shahpur Kandi, Renukaji and Ken-Betwa projects, among others.
Under the project, a 232.6-metre-high concrete gravity dam will be built on the Tons river along the border of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, with a storage capacity of 1,562 million cubic metres. It is expected to irrigate 97,000 hectares of land and generate 1,476 million units of hydropower. Shah said Delhi would be the biggest beneficiary of the project.
The project has been declared a national project, with the central government bearing about 90 per cent of the cost and the remaining 10 per cent shared among the participating states, in line with a 1994 agreement between the states. Shah said the government would also help Uttarakhand meet its share of the financial burden.
Shah said the project would release 25 per cent of the water for the Yamuna’s environmental flow, which he said had not been accounted for when the river’s waters were originally allocated among the states. He said the move would support efforts to clean the Yamuna, and in turn the Ganga, by 2029.