The Government of India’s Rs 5.50 lakh crore plan, to undertake the interlinking of 30 rivers is being wrongly touted as a new and novel idea. It is anything but that.
Around 1977, Captain D. J. Dastur (no relative of mine), had suggested this very idea (a garland canal) but the government found the project unfeasible.
According to a paper "National River Linking Project of India” by noted water resource engineer Naveen Joshi in Hydro Nepal, January 2013 (nepjol.info), "In the 19th century, Sir Arthur Cotton had made a navigational plan for India from Assam to Bombay primarily for the transportation of......