Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay’s unusual gesture of seeking a meeting with his Karnataka counterpart, D K Shivakumar, to address the Cauvery dispute’s latest episode must be applauded. Sharing the river’s water in a distress year is otherwise a fertile ground for posturing, and can quickly turn into a theatre of spectacle for antagonistic politics. It is unfortunate that circumstances in either state meant that an opportunity was lost to manage the dispute without further escalation and costs. The states would do well to avoid adversarial litigation and pursue deliberative means to coordinate the sharing.
The current escalation is the second once since the Supreme Court gave its decision on Cauvery water sharing in 2018. In an unprecedented intervention, the court exercised appellate jurisdiction over an inter-state dispute and modified the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal’s 2007 award. The court’s decision led to the creation of the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) to give effect to its decision, with support of its technical arm, the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC).
The Supreme Court’s allocation, at 50 percent dependability of the long-term median availability at the river basin, requires Karnataka to release 177.25 thousand million cubic feet in a ‘water year’ (May 31 to June 1) at Biligundlu—the boundary point where the releases are monitored. Since the 2018 order, the institutional architecture of the CWMA has not had to deal with allocation in a distress year (below 50 percent dependability), except in 2023. The Cauvery basin had an unusually good run with the monsoon over the past decade.
The 2023 episode followed the usual trajectory of protests and political mobilisation in both states and challenges to the decisions of the CWMA in the Supreme Court—all despite established mechanisms of technical assessment, institutional deliberation and timely directions to share the limited waters during a distress year. The court ultimately declined to interfere with the regulatory authorities’ assessment and directions, underscoring the institutional competence of the CWMA and CWRC.
Importantly, these bodies do not operate in isolation from the states: the Cauvery management architecture brings together representatives of the basin states and the Centre, with their deliberations informed by technical inputs from agencies such as the Central Water Commission and the Indian Meteorological Department. The costs of such escalation are not only legal and administrative; they impose wider economic costs and deepen political antagonisms. The political posturing shrinks the space for coordinated and collective efforts to deal with deficit resources and manage the crisis.
The current episode is following a similar trajectory. The CWRC has directed Karnataka to ensure 12,000 cusecs of water released daily at Biligundlu for a period of 15 days, revised upwards on August 11 after improved rainfall from an earlier order for 3,500 cusecs. This follows the established institutional process rather than an ad hoc one. They involve repeated assessments of rainfall, forecasts, reservoir storage, inflows and the competing requirements of the basin states, with directions revised as conditions change. Given the uncertainties involved in predicting rainfall and water availability over space and time, no amount of institutional process or litigation can eliminate such uncertainty. It must instead be managed, and that is possible only through collective and coordinated responses.
This is the most crucial takeaway here. The legal and institutional architecture, by design, cannot create the political trust needed to address uncertainty collectively. The institutions can respond to hydrological uncertainty, but cannot eliminate it.
These uncertainties are likely to grow with climate change.
A quick perusal of experiences in recent years demonstrates this. Over the past four years, the flows recorded at Biligundlu were 667.2, 81.4 (the 2023 distress year), 305.6, 330.4 tmc. The challenge is to manage such variability without turning every deficit year into an episode of escalation.
This is where we must lean on statesmanship and diplomacy to supplement law and regulation. Water diplomacy conventions emphasise continuous dialogue, transparency, joint fact-finding, political engagement and trust-building. The political ecology of shared rivers frequently produces conditions where the parties involved will disagree, sometimes profoundly. Such disagreements are often shaped by domestic political constituencies within the respective states. What is needed are processes through which they can understand each other’s constraints and negotiate difficult situations before disagreement turns into confrontation.
The Cauvery dispute needs precisely such a layer of deliberative disputation.
First, Chief Minister Vijay’s gesture should be seen as a beginning of a dialogue process between the states. Such diplomacy must be pursued on a sustained basis, and not just when a crisis erupts during distress years. Such trust-building measures could also create greater space for contentious issues such as the Mekedatu project to be discussed on their own merits, rather than through the prism of accumulated mistrust between the states.
Second, there is a need to strengthen the CWMA and CWRC institutional processes through a more robust data gathering, transparency and joint interpretation. Much of the relevant data is already available with government agencies. What is needed is greater transparency and institutionalised processes through which the two states can jointly examine and interpret the data so that the disagreements are about the implications of the data rather than about the data itself.
Third, it is worth exploring the right kind of institutional process to bridge the two: a political deliberative space that can complement and supplement the existing legal and institutional processes. How can anticipated distress be managed through collective efforts before it becomes a crisis? This could take the form of a separate bilateral process or augment existing institutional spaces such as the Inter-State Council. The goal should be to begin the deliberative process before distress turns into a political crisis driven by opportunistic escalation.
The meeting between the two Chief Ministers may not happen this time; but the idea behind it should not be lost. It does not have to wait for another crisis or conflict. There is no need to approach courts every time the monsoon fails. We need to fill the missing political and deliberative layer—one that allows the states to disagree, negotiate and accommodate each other.
Srinivas Chokkakula | President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
(Views are personal)