Lucknow, Aug. 26: A day after the Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh governments signed the country’s first river-linking pact, the green brigade, including Medha Patkar, has attacked the project.

The activists claimed that the Rs 4,000-crore plan, which includes a dam on the river Ken and a 231-km canal joining it to the Betwa, will submerge villages and roads and ruin vegetation and wildlife on both rivers’ banks.

The agreement was inked by the Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh chief ministers, Babulal Gaur and Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Union water resources minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi in New Delhi yesterday in the presence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The “historic” pact, the ministers had declared, would benefit drought-prone areas of both states, especially the Bundelkhand region.

Betwa of Uttar Pradesh, which flows into the Yamuna, is deficit in water. It will receive the surplus flow from Ken, which originates in Uttar Pradesh and then runs south across Madhya Pradesh. The Daudhan dam will be built on the Ken near its origin.

Medha, who has got in touch with anti-dam activists of both states, may visit Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, part of whose forest land will be submerged. In Uttar Pradesh, Magsaysay award-winner environmentalist Sandeep Pandey and his wife Arundhati, a close Medha associate, will visit the source of the Ken in Banda district to put together a team of protesters.

Geologists such as V.K. Joshi, former regional director of Geological Survey of India, too, has criticised the project saying it will damage the ecosystems of both rivers.

The agreement was signed on the basis of a rough feasibility report, with the detailed project report yet to be prepared. The feasibility report concedes that the project will submerge some about 100 sq km in Panna, Chatarpur and Damoh districts ? including 19 villages and about 37.5 sq km of forest land ?as well as a 30-km road in Gangau-Shahpura in Madhya Pradesh.

To this green activists have added a further list of destruction. They say the Ken supports endangered aquatic fauna and flora as it courses through Madhya Pradesh. The dam will reduce its flow, depriving animals in the forests flanking it.

What about the floods the project is going to prevent? Geologist V.K. Joshi said that as opposed to man-made ones, natural floods serve a purpose.

“Peak discharge and flooding are natural hydrological events that restore ecological balance of the river valley; any major interference into this system is a recipe for disaster,” he said.