A Cauvery yatra

The Tribunal’s award is in two parts. First, it is stipulated that Karnataka will ensure the supply to the Mettur reservoir in Tamil Nadu of 205 tmc Cauvery waters over the agricultural year (June-May). This is about 33 per cent of the quantity which Tamil Nadu had been receiving under the earlier Madras-Mysore agreement which ran for half a century from 1924 to 1974. If all Tamil Nadu parties unanimously agreed to receiving just a third of the Cauvery waters which the state was previously receiving, it was because the second part of the award stipulated a week-by-week schedule for the release of the waters based on the requirements of the agricultural season. Two-thirds of the annual requirement was to be furnished in one-third of the year — when most required for irrigation — and one-third of the supplies effected during two-thirds of the year when the requirement for irrigation is less.

Karnataka has fulfilled the first part of the award and violated the second. In both the years since the establishment of the CRA, two-thirds of the waters have been flushed down the Cauvery in the eight months they are not much required and only one-third has been made available in the four months of the year when the agricultural need is at its most desperate. Indeed, in the one hundred weeks that have passed since the CRA was set up (to wild and illiterate applause from much of the media) there has not been a single week when supplies have matched the stipulated weekly schedule. In only about 20 per cent of the weeks has the supply approximated to within 1 tmc the quantity stipulated in the schedule. In 80 per cent of the weeks, the physical supply has borne no relation to the schedule. When the delta has been lashed with cyclonic storms, and rivers, rivulets and canals are overflowing, Karnataka has added to the misery of the people of the delta by flooding the Mettur. When in June, July, August andSeptember the kuruvai crop most needs the water, Karnataka has been hoarding supplies and denying Tamil Nadu its due.

Karunanidhi kept quiet till 11 September last year. And kicked up a huge shindig from 12 September onwards. For on 11 September, Tamil Nadu went to its second and final round of polls for the Lok Sabha elections — in which the DMK and the BJP were unprincipled allies. The DMK, therefore, suppressed all desire to embarrass its new-found BJP ally. The polls over, Karunanidhi suddenly woke up to what was happening in the Cauvery. This year again, although minor relief was secured in the July meeting of the CRA, Karunanidhi has chosen to keep absolutely silent through July and August when as against its legal obligation to supply 98 tmc, Karnataka has limited supplies to the Mettur to a mere 56 tmc. Indeed, in the four crucial weeks from the last week of July to the third week of August, against 52 tmc to be supplied, only 12 tmc was made available. Worst, in the last week of July only 1 tmc of nearly 14 tmc was given. Never before has the interim award been so outrageously violated.

Justice demands a return to the Supreme Court to plead for a resumption of the hearings suspended when the attorney general gave what have turned out to be false assurances on behalf of the Vajpayee government about the establishment of a mechanism to implement the interim award. The government’s plea is that a clarificatory order of the Tribunal allows Karnataka to merely respect the annual stipulation and not adhere to the weekly schedule. In consequence, the fantastic irrigation network built over a thousand years from Chola times through the British Raj to the first quarter century of Independence lies atrophying through disuse. In the Cauvery delta, of all places, almost all irrigation is now done by bore-wells. Information supplied by the Union minister of water resources to his parliamentary consultative committee, of which I am a member, shows that the water table has alarmingly sunk in both Thanjavur and Nagapattinam districts which comprise the bulk of the Cauvery delta.

Meanwhile, the Cauvery Modernisation Plan, readied decades ago with assured World Bank funding, gathers dust in dingy cupboards because it cannot be implemented till the inter-state dispute is resolved. And all the conservation plans so painstakingly worked out by the Central government’s research centre at Trichy also lie unused because Vajpayee shows not the least hint of statesmanship nor any awareness of the national interest. Is this justice? Let the Supreme Court decide.

Today, I am launching my Cauvery Yatra, which will take me through almost all 450 panchayats of my constituency, posing the simple question: Do we trust the CRA or should we return to the Supreme Court? Lakhs of signatures will give their own answer.

When lashed with cyclonic storms, Karnataka has been flooding the Mettur. When the kuruvai crop in Tamil Nadu most needs the water, it has been hoarding supplies