NEW DELHI: Barely months away from the Assembly elections, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah couldn’t have asked for more. His state got a bigger share of the The final Supreme Court order on the Cauvery on Friday reduced the state’s allocation of Cauvery water from Karnataka by 14.75 tmcft. The Mettur Dam will now get 177.25 tmcft of water, instead of 192 tmcft, from the Billigundlu site.
Besides this, 10 tmcft would be used for environmental protection and 4 tmcft would be kept for “inevitable escapages” into the sea.
While delivering its verdict on the Cauvery water dispute, a bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra declared the river a national asset and upheld the water-sharing arrangements finalised by the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal (CWDT) in its award on February 5, 2007.
“The drinking water requirement of the overall population of all the states has to be placed on a higher pedestal as we treat it as a hierarchically fundamental principle of equitable distribution,” the ruling stated.
The judgment stated that the CWDT did not take note of Tamil Nadu’s stock of an empirical 20 tmcft of groundwater. The court held that it would take into account at least 10 tmcft of this groundwater and reduce this amount from the 192 tmcft supplied to Tamil Nadu.
The court observed that while Bengaluru’s drinking-water requirement had increased multi-fold, the tribunal did not consider its growing needs and presumed that 50 per cent of its drinking-water requirement would be met from groundwater supply.
The bench allocated 4.75 tmcft to Bengaluru, though it is outside the Cauvery basin, and said: “The view taken by the tribunal ignores the basic principle pertaining to drinking water and is thus unsustainable.”
It also upheld the award of 30 tmcft water to Kerala and allowed Puducherry’s request to grow a second crop. However, it did not allow an enhancement in the water allocation to Puducherry from the 7 tmcft allotted by the Tribunal in 2007.
The court gave the Centre six weeks to formulate a scheme to ensure compliance of its judgement. It also rejected the Centre’s argument that Section 6A of the Inter-State Water Disputes Act of 1956, by employing the word ‘may’, left room for the Central government’s discretion in framing a scheme. Subject to the formulation of a scheme, the water-allocation arrangement would stand unchanged for 15 years, the court said.
Referring to the international rules of Helsinki, Compione and Berlin on equitable distribution of river water passing through various nations, the bench said the “river is a national asset and no state can claim exclusive ownership of such waters or deprive other states. The waters of an inter-state river passing through the corridors of the riparian states constitute (a) national asset and cannot be said to be located in any one state.”
The court also disagreed with Karnataka’s argument that it had no bargaining power in the 1892 and 1924 post-Mettur Dam agreements on Cauvery water allocation.
What it means for TN
nSince it is the SC’s final verdict on the issue, Karnataka would be under a higher obligation to release water as per the monthly quota. So far, on many occasions it failed to honour the tribunal’s award and SC’s interim orders
nThe SC mandate to Centre to frame a “scheme” to implement the verdict in six weeks may finally push it to form the Cauvery Management Board and the regulatory committee. This will help TN get the assured quantum
nThe reduction in allocation to TN may affect cultivation in a sizeable chunk of land, especially at the tail-end of the delta region
nThe SC did not pass any order to save standing crops, which would wither if water is not released immediately