Vidarbha’s Unfinished Irrigation Projects

thenewsdirt
Mar 25
5 min read

In Vidarbha the conversation around water isn’t new, it’s old, tired, and still unresolved. Canals carve through the countryside like veins without blood, and half-built dams rise like monuments to plans that never reached their end.

If you ask around, you’ll hear the same quiet frustration. There was hope once. There were promises. But what followed has been a long wait under the sun.

Where Ambition Meets Delay

At first glance, Vidarbha seems like a place made for farming. Its black cotton soil holds moisture well, and rivers like the Wardha, Wainganga, and Penganga are not in short supply.

The geography gives every reason to believe this land could flourish with irrigation. Yet, decades of planning have yielded little real change.

After independence, India looked to agriculture as the backbone of its economy. Regions like Vidarbha were mapped out for development through large-scale irrigation schemes.

But over time, these ambitions were met with delays, oversights, and a maze of administrative hurdles.

The Gosikhurd Irrigation Project is one of the most well-known examples. Announced with enthusiasm in 1984, it aimed to bring water to over 2.5 lakh hectares across Nagpur, Bhandara, and Chandrapur.

The project’s foundation stone was laid by the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, setting expectations high. The cost then stood at ₹372 crore. Four decades later, it has crossed ₹18,000 crore. It is still not complete.

By 2018, as noted by the Comptroller and Auditor General, only about 20 per cent of the target area had received any irrigation benefit.

Work continues, with new deadlines announced like routine weather reports. The latest, in October 2024, promised completion by June 2026. Whether this timeline holds is anyone’s guess.

But it’s not just about this one project. The same story echoes across others. Bembla, Bawanthadi, and Lower Wardha, among many, were each launched with a blueprint for change and each stumbling over land acquisition, budget overruns, and poor execution.

Reports from The Times of India and SANDRP reveal a grim pattern. There is planning without groundwork, funding without foresight, and construction without continuity.

What’s striking is not just the delay, but the consistency of it. Nearly every major irrigation initiative in the region has faced similar obstacles.

Budgets balloon, deadlines slip, and work slows to a crawl. In a 2012 disclosure, the Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation admitted a cost hike of ₹17,700 crore across 37 projects, in just three months. Numbers like these point to a larger problem than just logistical hiccups. They speak of deep-rooted issues in how these projects are conceived and managed.

More Than Maps and Machines

Failed Irrigation Projets in Vidarbha — Failed Irrigation Projects in Vidarbha

For those living in the cities, irrigation may feel like a distant concern. But in Vidarbha’s rural pockets, it’s the line between survival and despair.

Agriculture here is still heavily dependent on rainfall. When that fails, the absence of working irrigation systems becomes more than an inconvenience, it’s a crisis.

Farmers wait for canals to fill. Crops wither. Loans mount. And hope, year after year, thins out. The link between water scarcity and the region’s troubling suicide rates among farmers has been discussed for years. While not every tragedy can be directly traced to failed irrigation, the lack of consistent water access leaves many with little protection against failure.

One might argue that cost is the issue. The Indian Express reported in 2022 that ₹43,560 crore would be needed to complete 123 pending irrigation projects in Vidarbha alone. That’s a staggering figure.

But the bigger concern is how the money is spent. Corruption has plagued many of these schemes, with investigations by the Anti-Corruption Bureau and public audits showing irregularities in contracts, substandard work, and repeated mismanagement.

The Gosikhurd project alone displaced over one lakh people across 92 villages.

Compensation and rehabilitation, in many cases, have been delayed or insufficient.

Public interest litigations regarding resettlement are still pending in court, highlighting the human cost of these half-built structures. In the race to build dams, entire communities were uprooted, and yet the very water they were promised hasn’t arrived.

There’s also the question of whether these large dams and expansive canal networks are even the right solution for the region’s topography.

Vidarbha’s varied terrain and scattered farming patterns might be better served by decentralised, smaller-scale water solutions. Instead, the focus has remained on massive infrastructure, projects that are more visible but not always more effective.

When Progress Clashes with Place

Not all delays stem from inefficiency or fraud. Sometimes, projects collide with the environment in ways that planners didn’t anticipate, or chose to ignore. The Human Dam, for instance, proposed in 1983, was meant to irrigate over 46,000 hectares in Chandrapur district.

However, its location near the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve sparked a different kind of resistance.

Conservationists warned that the dam would disrupt wildlife corridors and increase human-animal conflict. Tigers, whose habitat already faces pressure from development, would find their movements restricted. In 2020, after much debate, the Maharashtra government scrapped the project.

While this was seen as a win for environmental protection, the cancellation left thousands of farmers without a much-needed water source. It highlighted a key flaw in many projects of planning that overlooks both ecological and social realities.

The Gosikhurd project has also faced criticism for felling trees and altering river patterns, contributing to environmental degradation.

What emerges is a familiar picture of grand designs made in conference rooms, far from the people and places they affect.

SANDRP’s work on the Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation underscores this. It shows that projects are often cleared without thorough environmental or social assessments and that once problems arise, course correction is rare.

What’s left are stretches of dry canals, concrete embankments cutting through fields, and a growing sense that nobody’s really in charge.

These failures represent a lack of connection between policy and place. Between what’s planned and what’s possible.

Illustration of an Ideal Irrigation Project in Vidarbha

Between who decides and who lives with the consequences. As of March 2025, Vidarbha still waits.

The latest promises for completion have been made, and new timelines drawn up. But those who’ve watched this story unfold for decades know better than to celebrate early.

The land remains rich, and the rivers still run, but trust, once lost, is harder to rebuild.

There are no easy fixes, and perhaps that’s the point. What Vidarbha needs isn’t another scheme or slogan.

It’s something quieter but stronger a shift in how decisions are made, whose voices are heard, and what success looks like. Not in cement poured or crores spent, but in water that reaches the field.

Because in the end, that’s all anyone ever asked for.