Don't drown in the politics

Seventeen years after the constitution of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, and after the body's final verdict was delivered on Monday, politics continues to overwhelm the issue at stake.

Much Cauvery water has flowed under the bridge of politics since the 1970s when the dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka first entered the courts for a resolution. Seventeen years after the constitution of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, and after the body’s final verdict was delivered on Monday, politics continues to overwhelm the issue at stake.

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Simply put, like all natural resources, the quantity of water from the river passing through the two states — as well as through Kerala and Puducherry — is limited and therefore require a balanced distribution according to demand and supply. If the dispute over Cauvery waters between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka led to full-blown riots in 1991, Bangalore being the worst affected, both states need to specially eschew political one-upmanship this time round. The days of ‘easy water’ have been over for a long time now. Similar disputes have played out between Punjab and Haryana (over the Yamuna-Sutlej link) and between Goa and Karnataka (over the Mandel-Mandovi basin). One must be wary of missing the real point: responsible water management. Instead of picking a scrap over the amount of thousand million cubic feet of water that the tribunal has allotted to the ‘players’, the states should work together and forge a policy that maximises a fair distribution and minimises the use of Cauvery waters as a weapon of choice.