Is a fair Cauvery solution so hard?

The row over the sharing of Cauvery water has been haunting the southern states for close to 136 years now with the issue exacerbated in more recent times by clashing emotions across state borders every time a monsoon fails to deliver its full quota. The wisdom of generations of Supreme Court judges has been unable to find the ultimate equitable solution that would stop the states of upper riparian Karnataka and lower riparian Tamil Nadu bickering with each other, while Kerala and Puducherry watch with interest as they also have a share in the river’s bounty. In the absence of political will by the chief ministers to meet face to face, the problem keeps recurring. Only nature offers a solution in years of monsoon plenty, when Karnataka can’t hold all the water in its reservoirs and it flows down its snaking west-east course, with the surplus sometimes emptying into the Bay of Bengal off Tamil Nadu’s coast.

A solution may lie in forming a Cauvery Management Board, like in Bhakra Beas, to take over operations of all Cauvery dams and direct how much water is released downstream even in distress years. There has been no will to countenance the bypassing of political authority and let scientific management take over, acting independently of pulls and pressures. Such a board was ordered to be set up by the tribunal that ruled on the disputes and gave its final award in 2007. Procrastination in setting up an authority led to periodic heartburn along the river’s course, now further complicated by proposals to build new dams, including in Kerala across a tributary of the Cauvery tributary Bhavani named Siruvani, and in Mekedatu in Karnataka. Truth to tell, the finite water resources are insufficient to meet the growing needs of irrigation and city water supply; and more dams will simply mean more problems.

The 13.6 tmc feet water ordered released over 10 days as interim relief for the samba crop lies in between what Karnataka was prepared to dispense (which is nearer nil in an increasingly water-needy state) and what Tamil Nadu, with a huge delta rice bowl entirely dependent on Cauvery flow, demanded. The historical baggage of an award favouring British-ruled Madras Presidency over the Mysore maharaja’s kingdom has been proving difficult to shake off. Under the 2007 final award, Karnataka is to keep 270 tmc feet while giving 419 tmc feet to Tamil Nadu, besides 30 tmc feet to Kerala and 7 tmc feet to Puducherry. Wouldn’t it be possible in this day and age to disperse water every year going by the same formula, or even a revised one depending on a Supreme Court verdict expected next month, subject, of course, to the actual flows in the river?