nNo person could be more happy than S Kalyanaraman, director, Saraswathi Research Centre, Chennai with the sankalap patra or the election manifesto of the BJP which was released on Monday.

The manifesto has three suggestions by Kalyanaraman, former banker of Asian Development Bank, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Kalyanaraman has been writing continuously to the Prime Minister about the need to interlink the major rivers, making water available all over the country at the turn of a tap and for the setting up of National Water Authority to manage the country’s waterways. All three suggestions are incorporated in the Sankalp Patra.

A long standing demand by the farmers of the State, the Interlinking of Rivers finds the pride of place in the manifesto. The party has sworn that it would implement the scheme, the dream project of former Prime Minister late Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which hit the road block in 2004 with the change of Government at the Centre.

The project visualises the inter linking of major rivers in the country with a network of canals to address the acute water shortage faced by many regions even as some States reel under severe flood.

For example, the Brahmaputra gets flooded during the Indian summer while the States of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangama face severe draught and crop failure. The surplus flood waters in north Indian rivers could be diverted to south Indian rivers to resolve the floods as well as draught that simultaneously ravage the country.

“It is a good project about which we have been hearing a lot . But when are they launching the project?”, asked Kattumannarkoil Kannan, a farmer leader in the Cauvery Delta Region of Tamil Nadu.