"The issue has been considered, but there is no decision as of yet," Yury Trutnev told a Cabinet session, adding that he was willing to continue deliberations.
First mooted more than 40 years ago, the plan envisages diverting the Ob, the Irtysh and the Yenisei away from the Arctic southward to irrigate rice and cotton fields in drought-ridden Central Asian republics. But it was shelved after two decades of debate, yielding to strong public opposition.
In late 2002, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov suggested reviving the ambitious project. He said a canal linking Khanty Mansiisk, in Western Siberia, to Central Asia would enable Russia to sell 6-7% of the Ob River's water to agricultural and industrial producers in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and, possibly, Turkmenistan.
The discharge of Central Asia's two great rivers Amudarya and Syrdarya, which flow west through Uzbekistan, southern Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, keeps diminishing, with less and less water left to feed the rapidly shrinking Aral Sea, once the world's fourth largest inland body of water.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a staunch support of the plan, said last month that along with sustaining the Aral, now one-fifth of its 1960 size, it could provide the whole region with fresh water.
He played down the move's environmental risks, saying: "They [the plan's masterminds] were saying back then [in the Soviet era] that it would have adverse effects [on the environment], but it won't really -- even marshlands will not go dry."
Leonid Polezhayev, the governor of Siberia's Omsk Region who boasts vast experience in building water infrastructure facilities, warned, however, that the plan's possible damage to regional ecosystems could far outweigh the potential benefits.
