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More dams to meet drinking water requirements favoured

By Our Special Correspondent

New Delhi Dec.12. The need for construction of more dams to provide "additional and carry over storages'' to meet the basic water needs of the country for drinking water, domestic and industrial requirement, irrigation and power generation was stressed at a seminar here on Wednesday.

The workshop was to celebrate the funding by the Norwegian Agency for Development and Cooperation (NORAD) of a Rs. 12 million project of the Central Soil and Materials Research Station (CSMRS) under the Ministry of Water Resources for "Investigation of Geological Hazards in Dam Reservoirs for Safety of Downstream Structures''.

The funds allocated by NORAD for this programme are a component of the bilateral development cooperation between India and Norway. CSMRS has already completed two projects on `Tunelling Technology' (1993-96) and `Environmental Geotechnology, (1997-2000) under institutional cooperation with Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Oslo.

Inaugurating the seminar, the Union water Resources Minister, Arjun Charan Sethi, said, "Construction of dams is inescapable even if we fully concentrate on water harvesting in a diversified manner. Efficient and cost effective construction technologies warrant geological and geotechnical investigations. This is all the more important in our country as the system of rocks encountered in large cases are of weak category and involves immense complexities.''

The areas of cooperation would include identification of hazards to dams, stability analysis, detection of seepage, cracks etc in dams, risk and reliability analysis, assessment of the quality and integrity of materials and evaluation of methods for rehabilitation of surface and sib-surface water resource structures.

Experts of Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Oslo would visit the Nathpa Jhakri Project and the Karcham Wangtoo Project in Himachal Pradesh, the Rihand Dam Project in Uttar Pradesh and the Teesta Dam project in West Bengal.

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