River Interlinking as Climate Adaptation : Policy Lessons from the Ken—Betwa River Linking Project in India

The article discusses whether large inter-basin transfer infrastructure is a plausible climate adaptation policy in semiarid regions, using the example of the Ken- Betwa River Linking Project (KBLP) in India. It suggests that KBLP can be explained as a hybrid project: a drought-risk management project, a regional development tool, and a state-building project in federal water governance. This hybridity creates both adaptive opportunities and governance vulnerabilities. The article is a synthesis of analyses of policy documents and of the conceptual synthesis of the adaptation and nexus scholarship. It demonstrates that the performance of climate adaptation lies more on the level of quality of the governance than on the engineering scale of the project in five dimensions, i.e. (i) climate-resilient hydrological design; (ii) ecological protection and compensatory landscapes; (iii) energy conscious operating rules; (iv) interstate responsibility over benefits, costs, and uncertainty; and (v) ruling by adaptive management in continuous monitoring and revision of rules. The case shows that river interlinking can only lead to adaptation when integrated into portfolio-based water governance, which focuses on demand management, groundwater reform and ecosystem resilience through supply augmentation.