I think about villages that flood every single monsoon right as other regions just a few hundred kilometers away are suffering through drought, and it feels almost cruel that we haven't found a way to share that water when the need on both ends is so real and so close.
Environmental scientists studying India's river-linking proposal have flagged that altering natural river flow at this scale risks significant, poorly-understood downstream ecological disruption, including impacts on the Sundarbans delta's salinity balance, that conservation-focused, localized water-harvesting approaches don't carry.