Centre for single tribunal to deal with water rows

Hyderabad: In order to end the delays and huge expenditure in-curred by individual river-wise tribunals, the Union government is going to introduce a bill in the current Budget Session of Parliament for constitution of a single permanent tribunal to deal with all inter-state river water disputes in the country. 

This was stated by Union minister of state for water resources Arjun Ram Me-ghwal at the conference of Southern Indian Irrigati-on ministers and officials here on Tuesday. However, even as the Union minister was talking about a si-ngle water disputes tribunal, the Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved the constitution of the Mahanadi Water Disputes Tribunal on the request of the Odisha state government. 

Mr Meghwal pointed out the undue delay and expenditure incurred in constituting river-wise tribunals. He suggested that state governments settle water disputes through di-alogue among themselves, outside the purview of tribunals and courts. Inter-state water disputes often hold up development, he said, and urged the case for a single permanent tribunal to deal with all cases. This would be a good solution and could be called the ‘Hyderabad Declaration’, he said.

The idea of a single permanent tribunal had been mooted by Union water resources minister Nitin Gadkari last year and was welcomed by the TS government then. 

Whenever inter-state wa-ter disputes arise, the Ce-ntral government uses its powers to constitute a tribunal to deal with distrib-ution and allocation of waters of the river. Every time the Central governm-ent has to find a retired Supreme Court judge to head the tribunal and oth-er retired judges as members, and allot office space to each tribunal in Delhi. The tribunals take a long time — decades sometim-es — to settle the disputes. 

There are currently 12 such tribunals in the cou-ntry. If a single permanent tribunal is appointed to deal with all river water disputes, then like the Su-preme Court, it can sit 24X7 to hear cases on a day to day basis.

In a related development, Mr Meghwal said that in view of the Supreme Court’s final verdict on the Cauvery water dispute, the Central government will within six weeks notify the constitution of the Cauvery River Management Board and River Regulatory Authority to oversee the implementation of the final award among all the Cauvery riparian states.

Harish defends projects in Telangana
Telangana irrigation minister T. Harish Rao has said that Kaleswaram or Palamuru-Rangareddy projects are old and ongoing projects. Hence the minister said that objections by neighbouring And-hra Pradesh is untenable. 

Participating in the Southern States’ Irrigation Ministers’ Conference, convened by the Central government here on Tues-day, Mr Harish Rao said that re-designing and re-engineering projects cannot be called as new projects as is being projected by the neighbouring state and said that even the Central government had approved the contention of the Telangana government in this regard. 

He said that per se, the TS has no objection in ri-vers inter-linking being proposed by the Centre but it should be done only after a thorough study on the total availability in Godavari river, after all the contemplated and ongoing projects by TS on Godavari are completed.