It has often been said that without the major and medium scale irrigation projects with their dams and canals that store and divert even the lean season flow of rivers, the requirements of irrigation could not have been met. Indeed, we have become so fond of such schemes and of canals, that we have forgotten that rivers ever had the had the functions of conveying water to lower riparian region. When additional water was required to be made available to Delhi as ordered by the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India in accordance with judgment in a case filed by this writer, the authorities concerned began planning a canal from the barrage at Tajewala to this city, even though both these places are on the river Yamuna. The reasoning for this proposal was that the river and its aquifers being dry, any water sought to be transferred through the river would get swallowed up by it or be pumped out by Haryana's state tubewells in the vicinity of Tajwala. This situation has arisen because, having employed high cost artificial solutions, we are caught in their vicious web and are loathe to employ the simple and natural solution to meet this requirement by simply using the river. By releasing this water after the monsoons, there would be non danger of transfer losses, and the river would have regained its health.

In order to arrive at the optimum and most most-effective solution for providing water for both irrigation and for domestic use, let us make a comparison of current yields through the already executed schemes of the upper Yamuna basin and potential yield of water in this region from the more environment-friendly schemes suggested in this paper. The Upper Yamuna River Board was constituted in March 1995, through a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the upper riparian state of the Yamuna basin on the 12th of May 1994. This MOU also divided the mean year availability of this basin from the river's source upto the Okhla barrage, assessed at 13.00 BCM (billion cubic meters) as follows (all figures in BCM):

States	Monsoon Months	Lean Season Months	Total
Haryana	4.107	1.623	5.730
Uttar Pradesh	3.216	0.816	4.032
Rajasthan	0.963	0.156	1.119
Himachal Pradesh	0.190	0.188	0.378
Delhi	0.580	0.144	0.724
Total	9.056	2.927	11.983

In addition to the above allocation 0.680 BCM were estimated flood spills during the monsoons and were therefore unusable; and 0.337 BCM was reserved as the river's flow during the lean season months for environmental reasons, [making a total of 13.00 BCM] . It is worth noting here that the states are able to use only between 20 to 50 per cent of their monsoon months allocations, though being deficient during the lean seasons. Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi are obliged to get water from the Punjab and U.P. It is also planned to build dams and reservoirs in the ecologically fragile Terrai region, and raise the height of the Tehri dam to provide additional 300 cusecs of water to Delhi during the lean season months.