CHANDIGARH: Before the next date of hearing on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal issue, slated for April, Chief Ministers of Punjab and Haryana, Bhagwant Mann and Nayab Singh Saini, respectively, will meet on January 27.
In November last year, a letter was written by the Union Minister of Jal Shakti, CR Patil, to both the Chief Ministers to hold a bilateral meeting to arrive at an amicable solution.
Sources said that Patil's letter indicated that the meeting would not be chaired by him, and the outcome of the discussions should be sent to the ministry to place it before the Supreme Court on the next date of the hearing.
The meeting will be held at Haryana Niwas in Chandigarh.
Senior officers of both governments are also expected to be part of the meeting. The last meeting between the two CMs was held in August in New Delhi, and was chaired by the Union minister.
The Haryana Government has taken the initiative and written to the Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, inviting him for talks, which have been accepted.
While the first meeting was held in July and then in August, they have concluded on a positive note. It is learnt that on December 26 last year, another letter from the Union Secretary, Department of Water Resources, sought the outcome of the meeting to place it in the court.
The Haryana government had a one-point agenda that the Punjab Government should complete the construction of the canal on its side in view of the directions of the Supreme Court.
The Punjab government has been maintaining that the state has no surplus water for others and demanding its legitimate share of the Indus waters.
CM Mann had urged the Central Government to utilise the waters of the Chenab River to resolve the water-sharing dispute between his state and Haryana, and sought the scrapping of the SYL canal project.
He had also mooted the idea of a Yamuna Sutlej Link (YSL) canal instead of the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal, saying the Sutlej river has already dried up and there was no question of sharing even a single drop of water from it.
Rather, water from the Ganga and Yamuna should be supplied to Punjab through the Sutlej, he had said while Mann highlighting that the SYL canal was an “emotive issue”.
Notably, the SYL canal issue has been a bone of contention between the two states for the past several years.
Last May, the Supreme Court directed the two states to cooperate with the Centre for an amicable solution to the decades-old dispute over the canal.
The SYL canal was conceptualised for the effective sharing of water between the two states from the Ravi and Beas rivers.
The project envisages a 214-kilometre canal, of which 122 km is to be constructed in Punjab and the remaining 92 km in Haryana.
Haryana has completed the project in its territory, but Punjab, which launched the work in 1982, shelved it. With the dispute lingering on for decades, the top court on January 15, 2002, ruled in favour of Haryana in a suit filed by the state in 1996 and directed the Punjab government to construct its portion of the SYL canal.