Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Karnataka’s proposal to construct the Mekedatu balancing reservoir has long been a thorny issue between the two states, which have often clashed over their share of waters of the Cauvery river.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay on July 27 sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to ensure that no statutory or administrative approval is granted to the project unless it is consistent with the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal’s 2007 award and the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment on the sharing of the river’s waters.
The letter was prompted by the Jal Shakti Ministry’s Parliament reply, which stated that the Supreme Court’s judgment of February 16, 2018, “does not expressly stipulate that Karnataka should obtain the consent of the lower riparian States before constructing a structure across the River Cauvery”.
In a detailed letter to the Prime Minister, Vijay urged the Union government to withdraw that reply, arguing that it overlooks settled legal principles governing interstate rivers and the rights of downstream States.
Between June 1 and July 23, Tamil Nadu said it should have received roughly 32 TMC of water under the tribunal award as modified by the Supreme Court in 2018.
However, it received only about 3.5 TMC. Even allowing for deficient southwest monsoon rainfall and proportionate reduction during a distress year, the state believes at least another 3 TMC should have been released. A deficit or delayed release will severely affect farmers in the Cauvery delta.
The Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC), which met in New Delhi on July 28 to review the situation in the drought-hit Cauvery basin, directed Karnataka to release 4 TMC of water to Tamil Nadu at a rate of 3,500 cusecs a day for 15 days.
Vijay sought a meeting with his Karnataka counterpart D K Shivakumar over the issue, marking a departure from his predecessors who had called for adjudication rather than meetings. Shivakumar urged Vijay to visit the Cauvery basin region in the state to assess the ground situation firsthand amid extreme drought conditions.
What’s the proposal
The Mekedatu dam project is located in Ramanagaram district, about 100 km south of Bengaluru, close to where the Cauvery enters Tamil Nadu. The dam has a proposed capacity of 48 TMC (thousand million cubic feet).
The proposed project has been contentious for years. Tamil Nadu maintains that increased upstream storage could enable Karnataka to regulate flows in a manner detrimental to downstream releases during dry years.
