Cauvery Pact Needs Review; New Deal Should Focus On Pricing, Compensation

The Karnataka government is likely to again flout the Supreme Court directive on the release of water to Tamil Nadu, this time backed with another resolution by the state legislature against the release of water.

Refusal to implement an earlier order has already forced its senior counsel, Fali Nariman, to stop representing the state, and a further refusal could result in formal contempt of court charges being brought against the Chief Minister or his government. It will clearly lead to a constitutional breakdown, where the Supreme Court’s orders are thwarted and a legislature, which is sovereign in its own sphere, refusing to accept a court verdict.

There are three issues that arise:

One, when one party (Karnataka) has never accepted the Cauvery award as reasonable and protective of the state’s interests, what is the value of such awards? Clearly, the first thing that needs to be done is to review the award and work out another that is formally accepted by both the states concerned as reasonable, not to speak of Kerala and Pondicherry. A corollary: no water sharing formula can work unless there is a provision for periodic review, especially when usage patterns can change dramatically.

Two, if upper riparian states can stop water flows based on their own assessments of need, no river pact can work. You either need third parties to decide what is fair sharing when water flows are down to a trickle, or you need a simple formula for ending disputes. One solution could be for upper riparian states to compensate lower riparian states for shortfalls in case they arbitrarily refuse to release water citing sovereignty. When rainfall failure can lead to crop failures, we have insurance. Why not build an insurance component into river water sharing, so that the affected parties are compensated?

Three, the current method of water sharing is decided based on state shares. But the real sharing happens not only between states, but within states. Just as there are upper and lower riparian states, there can be upper and lower riparian districts within the same state. For example, Mandya and Mysuru are upper riparian districts to the urban centre of Bengaluru, and merely announcing a sharing agreement between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka will not solve the problem. What if the sharing between Mandya-Mysuru and Bengaluru is itself unfair to one or the other?

The only way to sort this problem out is through a proper pricing of water. There is no getting away from it. In the absence of people paying for it, water may be overused in low value areas and be unavailable to others willing to pay more.

If both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had to pay for the water, especially in lean monsoon years, both of them will figure out the optimum way to share the water.

When water is free, we will only get fights and contempt of courts.

See also:

-Cauvery on fire: only way to douse it is by the revisiting the basis of past accords

-To understand the Cauvery dispute of today, start from the 19th century