It is too early to say whether Monday’s Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal award will help this country put one of its most bitter water-sharing disputes — going back over a century — behind it. On the face of it, neither of the two big states in this dispute, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, has got what it had argued for. Karnataka has already filed a review petition, and Tamil Nadu may well follow suit. We have waited 17 years for this award. If there is no closure despite all this effort, it only indicates the intractable and emotive nature of river water disputes in this country, no matter whether they involve the sharing of the Ravi-Beas waters between Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, the Krishna waters between Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, or, more recently, the spat over the Mullaperiyar dam between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Each has become a political flashpoint, easily exploited by the politically ambitious. These interminable river water battles highlight two important aspects. One, that the debate has hovered for far too long on the distribution of river waters. We now need to shift it to a discussion on the storage, management and utilisation of river waters. India’s performance in terms of impounding water is nothing short of pathetic. Its per capita storage at 130 cubic metres is far lower than most of the world’s bigger countries today. The US, for instance, has a per capita storage of 5,000 cubic metres. To protect its ambitious growth trajectory and the welfare of its people, the country urgently needs to reinforce its storage capacities. Big dams today have become nothing less than an infrastructural imperative. The second aspect emanates from the first. It is precisely because water is so valuable and has become such a volatile issue which has the potential to extract a terrible political cost, that the Centre cannot afford to stand aloof from issues of water management and distribution. Water is a state subject under the Constitution, but there is also constitutional provision for investing the Centre with powers of intervention and adjudication. River water disputes have so far been framed in a fashion that is too narrow and too regional. They need to be redefined in terms of national interest — and only the Centre can ensure that. It’s time then for the Centre to get its feet wet.
