Against the flow

Cauvery dispute highlights poor water management policies

Tensions between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the sharing of the Cauvery river waters date back to over a century earlier. Now the exigencies of climate change are adding to the intensity of the conflict, which has swiftly acquired political connotations ahead of the parliamentary elections next year. But the current dispute is also a reflection of the poor standard of water management in both states, which create shortages whenever seasonal rain is deficient. This is a sorry situation for the states whose capital cities claim to be India’s Silicon Valley and Detroit but depend heavily on the Cauvery river for the bulk of their urban and agricultural water supply.  

The source of tensions in the two states, ruled by parties of the INDIA alliance, stem from a severe rainfall deficit in the Cauvery basin this year, which has put pressure on a water-sharing agreement mandated by the Supreme Court in 2018. An immediate issue is a demand from Tamil Nadu for the release of 10,000 cubic feet per second (or cusecs) of water for 15 days from Karnataka, the upper riparian state. In response, the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA), set up by the central government following the Supreme Court verdict, directed Karnataka to release 3,000 cusecs and rejected Tamil Nadu’s claim for the supply of the backlog. This order and the fact that Karnataka complied with it despite reservoirs being at 60 per cent of 2022 levels have precipitated protests from both sides — by Karnataka’s farmers for the water being released and by Tamil Nadu for not receiving enough.

Eluding the debate is the obvious immediate solution of sober discussion and negotiation between the two state administrations. Also lost in the storm of protests is the obvious need to improve water management policies to deal with increasingly erratic rainfall patterns. Had both states built more reservoirs, they could have built up storage capacities in years of good rain. For instance, between June 2022 and May 2023, Tamil Nadu received from Karnataka almost five times its legal mandate. Yet the storage level in Veeranam Lake, the key reservoir that supplies water to Chennai city, has fallen to a third of its capacity this year, pointing to reprehensibly wasteful water management. At the same time, Bengaluru, which has destroyed its water bodies in the interests of urban sprawl, is now critically dependent on the Cauvery through an elaborate pumping system to lift water 100 km away to the city situated at 3,000 feet above sea level. This engineering system, said to be Asia’s largest pumping exercise, is also wasteful with the data pointing to a 29 per cent wastage in daily water supply from transmission losses. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has approached the CWMA for permission to build a check dam close to Bengaluru to address the city’s perennial drinking water crisis, a sensible solution that Tamil Nadu could profitably explore.

The latest dispute is a pointer to the kind of inter-state disagreements that are inevitable as the monsoons become more erratic. There are currently eight other major inter-state river disputes in play. They will periodically test the limits of cooperative federalism unless the states concerned eschew political grandstanding and focus on the plethora of sensible, low-cost water management techniques to recharge reservoirs and groundwater levels.