August 24, 1998

The Cauvery Authority is a fraud on the farmer of the delta

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Let me at the outset declare my interest. The whole of the constituency from which I was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1991 falls in the Cauvery delta. It is also from there that I was defeated successively in 1996 and 1998. It is from there that I intend to stand in the next election. The next election, I believe, is almost upon us.

And as the prospective candidate for the Cauvery delta, I wish to protest against the fraud being perpetrated on the farmers there in the guise of an agreement brokered by the prime minister -- with the consent of the chief ministers of the four states concerned -- to implement the seven-year-old interim award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) through an authority comprising the disputants.

An authority is supposed to be just that -- a body vested with the authority to implement what has been ordered. But Vajpayee's Cauvery Authority has no authority at all. It is a debating club where the very disputants who have been unable to resolve anything have been given the veto to block any decision.

In any case, the primary objective of implementation is not whether the required 205 TMC of water has flown down the Cauvery over the past 12 months from Karnataka through the Mettur dam into Tamil Nadu. If that was all there was to it, a leisurely gathering once a year of a prime minister and four chief ministers, over sambar, rasam, and thayir shaadam, would have been perfectly in order. What the CWDT has ordered is much more than a guaranteed annual outflow. The heart of the interim award is a schedule of weekly releases through the critical summer months related to the irrigation requirements of the kuruvai crop. It is specifically stipulated that shortfalls in one week have to be made up in the following week.

Can anyone imagine that every week from May to August the prime minister of India will have nothing better to do that get together with four busy chief ministers to count the number of drops that come dripping into the Mettur reservoir? If water is not available in a specified week in June, no purpose is served in releasing the balance in September. The problem is here and now. Either the water comes when required, or it ceases to be needed. That is the kind of emergency for which the CWDT specified the minimum weekly releases. It is the weekly releases that have to be monitored and assured by the authority. That is a technical and administrative task, not a matter for political negotiation.

Which is precisely why the Supreme Court advised Karnataka to go to the CWDT to seek relief in distress. The weekly releases were specified not as sufficient to meet the delta's needs but as the minimum required. This was because the CWDT recognised the annual guaranteed outflow it was recommending was under a third of what the delta had received till 1974 and just about half of what it would have received under an accord reached in 1976 but later abandoned.

Vajpayee's Cauvery Authority is a distress-sharing forum. But the minimum weekly outflow is itself a distress-sharing formula. The CWDT assumed that in the normal course, when the rains had been adequate, more than the stipulated minimum would automatically flow to the lower from the upper riparian. Which is why there was no special provision for distress. When Karnataka asked what would happen if the rains failed and even the minimum stipulated could not be supplied without extreme distress to Karnataka farmers, the Supreme Court ordered the CWDT to adjudicate the sharing of extreme distress on any petition to this effect from Karnataka.

Vajpayee has brushed aside this sage advice. When things get difficult and are at their most politically volatile, the disputants most affected will get together under the aegis of the Cauvery Authority to negotiate a solution. There will be rhetoric, threats, walk-outs, posturing, press releases. It is impossible to believe there will be any water. That is no problem for the upper riparian, Karnataka. But how will Tamil Nadu get its water when it most requires it? An independent authority would have guaranteed Tamil Nadu its minimum requirement, even in extreme distress; the Vajpayee Authority can authorise nothing but babble.

Then why has Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi accepted it? Because the month is now August, not May. The kuruvai crop has been sown, transplanted and watered. It is being readied for harvesting. Any additional releases at this stage will have no agricultural significance, either for Tamil Nadu or Karnataka. And the present agreement expires in April 1999, a month before the sowing of the next kuruvai is to begin.

Karunanidhi and Karnataka's J.H. Patel have given their assent because both know the Vajpayee formula is perfectly meaningless. It is not for implementation this summer. And will cease to be valid next summer. The Cauvery Authority, both say most emphatically, is not for implementing the final award. When the final award comes next April, the Cauvery Authority will be dumped. And we will be back to the quibbling, the rigmarole and the legal legerdemain.

Why should J. Jayalalitha play along with this fraud? Which is why I say the next election is almost upon us.

The author is secretary, AICC. The views expressed here are his own.

Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions | Syndication

© Living Media India Ltd