A pointless exercise

Govt's single adjudicator for water disputes is ill-conceived

The government’s decision to set up a single permanent tribunal to adjudicate all inter-state river water rows is a move that will serve little purpose. If tribunals going exclusively into specific disputes fail to resolve them speedily and to the satisfaction of the contending parties, it is futile to expect a solitary body, probing several disputes simultaneously, to do a better job. Interestingly, the proposal to amend the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956, for this purpose, approved by the Cabinet recently, provides for constituting temporary benches to look into select cases apart from setting up disputes resolution committees to go into each discord before referring it to the tribunal. All this is, obviously, tantamount to an acknowledgement by the government that it is wary of the efficacy of a single adjudication body. The proposed mechanism would tend to complicate, instead of simplifying, the dispute settlement process, causing further delays.

Indeed, the idea of a single adjudicator is not wholly novel. It was conceived by the previous United Progressive Alliance government in 2012 but was not pursued as its flaws soon became apparent. Why the present government has chosen to resurrect it now is, therefore, hard to fathom. Of the numerous tribunals and judicial commissions appointed in the past, few have managed to come out with workable verdicts though many of these decrees, too, have remained unimplemented. Moreover, most of the tribunal awards ultimately land up in the courts for further adjudication or are rejected by  the states concerned. There have been cases — such as the Krishna basin dispute — where, even after notifying the original award, a second tribunal had to be set up to look into the row afresh. The Cauvery dispute has been lingering on regardless of the tribunal award and several subsequent court orders. The case of the Satluj-Yamuna link canal is no different. One of the contending states (Punjab in this case) has been steadfastly refusing to honour the verdicts of tribunals, judicial commissions and even the Supreme Court. Among the umpteen other cases that have tended to defy resolution for long despite interventions at the highest level, the most notable ones relate to the sharing of waters of Polavaram (also known as Indira Sagar) dam, Babhali Barrage and Mullaperiyar dam. 

A water-deficit country such as India can ill-afford inordinate delays in the settlement of such rows as they invariably lead to the injudicious use of water. The ideal solution for putting inter-state water wrangles at rest would be to amend the Constitution to declare water as a common national resource under the jurisdiction of the Centre. However, since this seems impossible as states won’t agree to give up control over water, it would perhaps be better to allow disputes to go directly to the judiciary instead of taking the circuitous route through committees and tribunals. This apart, it may also be worthwhile to think of some out-of-the-box ideas, including ones involving monetary compensation, to amicably settle water rows. The underlying objective should be to make the states vie with each other for economising the use of water, rather than splurging it, to satisfy genuine demands and stave off the need for judicial interventions.