India faces a major crisis of water as we move into the 21st century. This crisis threatens the basic right to drinking water of our citizens; it also puts the livelihoods of millions at risk. The demands of a rapidly industrialising economy and urbanizing society come at a time when the potential for augmenting supply is limited, water tables are falling and water quality issues have increasingly come to the fore. Recent scholarship points to definite limits to the role new large dam projects can play in providing economically viable additional water storage (Ackerman, 2011). The ambitious scheme for interlinking of rivers also presents major problems. The comprehensive proposal to link Himalayan with the Peninsular rivers for inter-basin transfer of water was estimated to cost around Rs. 5, 60,000 crores in 2001. Land submergence and R&R packages would be additional to this cost. There are no firm estimates available for running costs of the scheme, such as the cost of power required to lift water. There is also the problem that because of our dependence on the monsoons, the periods when rivers have “surplus� water are generally synchronous across the subcontinent. A major problem in planning inter-basin transfers is how to take into account the reasonable needs of the basin states, which will grow over time.