september 17, 2016
Water Wars
We need credible institutions to settle water-sharing disputes like the one on the Cauvery.
T
oday it is Karnataka and Tamil Nadu fighting over
water; tomorrow it could be any other combination of
states in India. The recent violence in Bengaluru and in
some parts of Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water-sharing
arrangement is neither exceptional nor unusual. Given the
problems of extending a scarce resource, the inability of people
to accept that conservation needs to be a norm today, not an
exception, and against the background of increasingly fractious
politics, water will continue to be the spark that sets off
conflicts, even wars.
That said, the question of how the water in the Cauvery river,
that flows through four states in its 800 km journey, ought to be
shared, had already been settled in 2007. The dispute is an old
one going back to agreements in 1892 followed by one in 1924
between Madras province and Mysore, then a principality. At
that time, the population depending on the river was relatively
small. By 1990, when the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT)
was established, populations had grown, Madras province was
Tamil Nadu and Mysore had become the state of Karnataka. It
took the CWDT 17 years to arrive at its final order in 2007 on how
the Cauvery waters should be shared between the four riparian
states—Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Puducherry. The
story did not end there as it then took the central government
another six years to notify the award in 2013, that too at the
prompting of the Supreme Court. When this happened, all the
states rushed to the Supreme Court challenging the award. As
a result, the apex court has now been handed the task of
apportioning water shares. The current flare-up followed the
12 September Supreme Court order directing Karnataka to
release 12,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) of water per day
to Tamil Nadu by 20 September.
The basic issues around the dispute have never changed;
what has altered is the manner in which information is dis-
pensed leading to a reinforcement of misconceptions. To begin
with, Karnataka has always believed that it never got its fair
share even though as an upper riparian it has more power to
control the flow of water. If in addition to hosting the source of a
river, the upper riparian also constructs dams, as Karnataka has
done, which regulate the flow of water, it can literally control
the levers of the flow of water. Yet, there is also the fact that
Karnataka’s reservoirs in the Cauvery basin have a lower stor-
age capacity than reservoirs in Tamil Nadu.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 17, 2016 vol lI no 38
The recent agitation in Karnataka following the Supreme
Court’s order is not just rooted in historical perceptions of
injustice in an earlier award but the politics of exploiting
inflammable issues like the availability of water. Both Tamil
Nadu and Karnataka are thirsty. This is not just because
neither has enough water to meet all the needs of their popula-
tions but also because the definition of those needs has
expanded. In agriculture, water-intensive cropping now domi-
nates in districts where Cauvery water is available. In addition,
increasing urbanisation, the neglect and overuse of groundwater
sources, traditional tanks and ponds have compelled govern-
ments to draw from surface water sources like rivers to satiate
urban demands. Together these add up to an untenable expec-
tation from a finite resource. In months where water levels
are low in the reservoirs, the gap between demand and supply
is exacerbated and even the best sharing formula will leave
one or both parties feeling aggrieved. This is precisely what
has happened between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. While the
CWDT has fixed a sharing formula in what are considered
“normal” rainfall years, it has failed to arrive at one for the
distress years that occur at least once in every three or four
years. Given changing weather patterns, and the erratic nature
of the monsoon where even if the volume of precipitation does
not vary dramatically, its spread over the months does, the
quantity of water stored in reservoirs is affected. This year, for
instance, the storage in Cauvery basin reservoirs in Karnataka
and Tamil Nadu is 30% and 49% lower respectively than the
average of the last 10 years.
There is no easy formula to sort out disputes like the one
on the Cauvery. Apart from anticipating and dealing with
fringe political groups that exploit such disputes, something the
Karnataka government failed miserably in doing, an equally
important step is to put in place credible institutions to imple-
ment water-sharing agreements. In the case of the Cauvery, this
has not been done. While the Cauvery River Authority and the
Cauvery Monitoring Committee were interim bodies during
the CWDT hearings, the Cauvery Management Board has not
yet replaced them. Even if the current crisis subsides, this is a
step that the central government needs to take so that the
discussion of water sharing is removed from the realm of incen-
diary politics and is replaced by the hard facts of precipitation,
storage levels and conservation.
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