You've provided a great ...

You've provided a great summary of some of the issues to start the conversation on what seems to be a highly contentious project. Efficiency is, as always, an underutilized approach. Virtual water concepts can address some of the disparities. These are ground-up approaches that the people and their provinces/states can work toward on their own, while the government maintains a necessarily broader and top-down approach from its own institutional perspectives. In October 2012 I posted some graphics with numerous links and references on the Indian Rivers Inter-Link Project at http://hydro-logic.blogspot.com/2012/10/monday-infographics-indian-rivers-inter.html I also have some Indian friends on Twitter who have provided local, on-the-ground perspectives that I hope to pass along through my blog soon. My impression overall is that this seems a very-long-haul project: there's little such thing as government fiat in democratic (and diverse) India, which stands in stark contrast to the massive land-and-water transfer projects that have been pushed nearer to completion in China...