For most of the year the Banas river through Deesa is a broad strip of sand. Gujarat now plans to hold back some of the water that does come down it. The state government has given in-principle approval to a Rs 581 crore “fish scale” weir near Mahadeviya village in Deesa taluka of Banaskantha district, IANS reported on November 3. The government’s stated aim is to store water and recharge groundwater.
A stepped barrier instead of a string of check dams
The weir will span about 500 metres of riverbed and rise in seven stepped levels, according to DeshGujarat. Behind it, water would back up for roughly 2.72 km, and a 4,795-metre embankment along the northern bank would keep that pool inside the channel. IIT Roorkee is working with the state on the design; both reports describe the institute’s dam-building experience but not the exact scope of its role.
Officials first looked at building several check dams along this stretch. Both outlets say the riverbed proved too wide for that approach, so the plan moved to a single stepped weir. Check dams are the usual tool for recharge in Saurashtra and north Gujarat, and they work best in narrow seasonal streams. A river channel hundreds of metres across calls for a larger structure.
Where the water would come from
Ponding on the Banas depends on flow reaching Deesa in the first place. The weir is meant to capture surplus river water in good monsoon years along with releases from the Dantiwada and Sipu dams upstream. Dantiwada sits upstream on the Banas itself. In a weak monsoon, when upstream reservoirs hold on to their water, the new pool may stay shallow. Neither report gives a storage volume or an expected recharge figure, so the scale of the benefit cannot yet be measured.
Seventy Deesa villages and thirty in Kankrej
The government counts 100 villages as beneficiaries: 70 in Deesa taluka and 30 in Kankrej taluka, IANS reported. For them, the gain would come through wells and tubewells rather than piped supply. Water held in a sandy riverbed seeps down into the aquifer, and over time that can slow the drop in water levels that forces farmers to drill deeper. Deesa is one of Gujarat’s main potato-growing areas, and its winter crop depends on how much water those wells still give.
The state has commissioned the final design, and construction follows that, with 2029 as the completion target. A second phase would develop the reservoir stretch as a local tourism spot; no details or costs have been released for that part. In-principle approval is an early stage. The project still needs a final design, a detailed estimate and a tender before any work begins on the riverbed, and the Rs 581 crore figure may change along the way.
Sources: IANS, DeshGujarat
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.