Barren Mother Cauvery

What can they do which the CRA cannot? For one, they can actually meet, both when a crisis is on and, far more important, when a crisis is not on, and calm heads can hammer out dispassionately the understandings which the PM and his circus of four CMs should have done over the last five wasted years. There are four possible elements of a workable settlement which experts and the farmers themselves can flesh out, provided always the PM/CMs display a modicum of political will and far-sightedness in dealing with a long-festering national issue.

First, there must be acceptance in principle of the award of the Cauvery Tribunal — both the present interim award and the awaited final award — as the basis for all further steps. It might be best for the direction on ‘‘in principle acceptance’’ to come from the Supreme Court itself so that the quasi-judicial award of the tribunal is vested with full judicial authority. Also, ‘‘in principle’’ must include adherence to both halves of the award — the stipulation regarding total annual flows as well as the stipulation regarding flows in the summer months of May to September to irrigate the kuruvai crop and raise the thaaladi nurseries in the delta.

That said, the enlarged team of government plus civil society including farmers, which I shall call CRA+, should work out a distress sharing formula. It is a reflection of the gross irresponsibility of the prime minister and his four CMs that for a full five years of their existence as CRA they have not taken even the first step towards discussing a formula that would define ‘‘distress’’; determine the means of assessing ‘‘distress’’; and fix the proportions in which the burden of ‘‘distress’’ is to be distributed all through the basin.

With agreement on the implementation of the award ‘‘in principle’’ in place and a distress formula to fall back upon, CRA+ will then be in a position to concentrate on the most important part of its task — which is conservation of water in a water-scarce basin. When there was little agriculture in the upper reaches and almost all cultivation was concentrated in the delta, there was no need to conserve abundance. Now that cultivation in the upper reaches is a fact of life, can we devise new ways of using less water to cultivate more? One way is to diversify, where possible, from thirsty crops like paddy and sugarcane towards less thirsty crops like cotton and sunflower. One estimate has it that some 30 per cent of the delta could so diversify. The moot question, however, is what of the remaining 70 per cent? This is where conservation comes in. Technical plans for the more efficient utilisation of water are not lacking and the central institute at Trichy has done yeoman work in this regard. But conservation — including the lining of canals, lifting the sand-mined bed of the river to the level of the irrigation canals, and the repair of sluice gates and other components of an irrigation system which have fallen into disuse by the continuing disputes of the last thirty years — will involve massive investment. That kind of money is readily available in the World

Bank-approved Cauvery Modernisation Plan (CMP) which has been gathering dust as the delta is turned into a desert. This is because the key pre-condition for CMP to become operational is that the river waters dispute has to be first settled. As the Cauvery dispute has remained on the boil for three decades, so has the CMP remained on the back-burner for three decades. Moreover, as CMP applies as much to the upper riparian as it does to the lower reaches of the basin, Karnataka has as much interest in the revival of CMP as do Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry or even Kerala. Had the PM and his CMs the least imagination, it is to setting the terms for the launching of CMP that they should have turned their attention over the five long wasted years since CRA was set up. Their failure to do so must be rectified by CRA+.

It is then — and then only — that engineering solutions involving the diversion of waters will make sense. The easiest way of augmenting water flows to the delta would be by giving priority to the Pennar-Cauvery link in the proposed peninsular grid. The Pennar is an Andhra Pradesh river. And Andhra Pradesh is not represented in CRA. That alone has rendered all talk of augmentation in CRA so much hot air. But the Pennar-Cauvery link is not the only answer. There are other solutions possible, including holding the waters between the last dam in Karnataka and the 200 kilometres which separate it from the point at which the Cauvery falls into Tamil Nadu; widening and deepening the Mettur reservoir; catching and storing the excess winter flow in the Kollidam, the drainage river of the Cauvery delta; and perhaps many others.

But none of this has been even ruminated upon in the CRA. The prime minister and his CMs have proved a washout. Therefore, it is only the Supreme Court and CRA+ that can render justice to the distressed farmers of the Cauvery basin.