Which region will benefit the most from the Ken-Betwa River Linking Project?

Concept: River-interlinking (river-linking) projects transfer surplus water from a water-surplus river basin to a water-deficit, drought-prone basin through a link canal; the beneficiary region is always the area lying within the destination river’s basin and the command area of that canal, not merely any nearby state.

Application: The Ken-Betwa Link Project is India’s first national river-interlinking project under the National Perspective Plan. It carries surplus monsoon water from the Ken river, via the Daudhan dam and a link canal, into the Betwa river system to irrigate and supply drinking water to the chronically drought-prone Bundelkhand plateau, whose districts lie in both southern Uttar Pradesh (Jhansi, Banda, Mahoba, Lalitpur) and northern Madhya Pradesh (Chhatarpur, Panna, Tikamgarh, Damoh).

Cross-check: Checking against the command area confirms the fit — only a basin drained by the Ken and Betwa rivers gains irrigation and drinking-water supply from this specific canal system:

• Deccan Plateau in Karnataka is drained by the Krishna–Tungabhadra river system, entirely outside the Ken–Betwa basin.

• The Himalayan foothills in Uttarakhand lie in the Ganga–Yamuna headwater belt, unrelated to the Ken–Betwa link canal.

• Coastal Andhra Pradesh is watered by the Godavari–Krishna deltas on the Bay of Bengal coast, far from central India’s Ken–Betwa catchment.

Bundelkhand (Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) is therefore the region that benefits, as it is the drought-prone plateau lying within the combined Ken–Betwa command area.