For Karnataka, with just a miniscule part of the basin in its territory, Mhadei may just be a ‘puddle’ in comparison with the gigantic Cauvery for which it has fought pitched battles over more than a century with its South-eastern neighbour Tamil Nadu. But for Goa, it is too big to ignore.
What however needs a closer look is whether the ‘twenty-eight versus two’ advantage Karnataka has over Goa in national politics did indeed play a role in the whole imbroglio, as the Opposition in Goa is now subtly implying.
Mhadei, Mandovi or Mahadayi, covers more than 40 per-cent of Goa’s geographical territory, perhaps the reason why politicians, the media and almost all and sundry are agitated over the Mhadei Water Dispute Tribunal award, notified earlier this week by the Centre. Only, the reactions we are seeing today, including the challenge of the award by the government should have come eighteen months ago, when on Independence Day eve in 2018, the award was delivered by the Tribunal.
But back then, at the helm in Goa was the late Manohar Parrikar, whose crisis-handling abilities are legendary. Perhaps why the very same water-sharing award, now being slammed, got hailed as a ‘victory for Goa’, leaving his successor Dr Pramod Sawant, facing the flak now, eighteen months later.
The dispute over Mhadei primarily between Goa and Karnataka, dates back to 1973. As many as nine chief ministers, four of them no more, have dealt with Karnataka on the issue and almost every political party has a share of the blame or credit, depending on whether one views the Tribunal’s award of August 2018, to be a victory or defeat for Goa.
Did the BJP, which is in power at the Centre, in Goa and in Karnataka, sacrifice the interest of a State (Goa) that elects just two MPs in favour of the one (Karnataka) which sends 28 to parliament?
PARRIKAR’S
letter to Yeddy in 2017
Signs that politicians and political parties were willing to play deceitful politics over Mhadei first surfaced in December 2017 when the late chief minister Manohar Parrikar wrote an innocuous letter not to the then Congress Karnataka CM but the BJP’s leader there, B S Yeddurappa when the three States involved were officially battling over the coveted waters of the river before the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal.
“I will not listen to my national leaders and sacrifice the interest of Goa,” Parrikar had thundered in the Goa Legislative Assembly on August 7, 2012, referring to the contentious Mhadei dispute which was then before the Water Dispute Tribunal.
Exactly five years and five months later, Parrikar, did with that letter to Yeddurappa exactly what he said he wouldn’t -- bowed down to the diktats, or ‘chunavi jumlas’ of BJP chief, Amit Shah.
The letter he wrote as Chief Minister of Goa not to his counterpart in Karnataka but to the BJP Chief of that State B S Yeddurappa on the eve of that State’s last Assembly elections expressed his willingness to negotiate the concession of 7-odd TMC water, for diversion to the Malaprabha basin for a drinking water project,on “humanitarian grounds” (sic), the very point of contention the two States were bitterly fighting over before the Tribunal.
Irony of ironies is that Parrikar let loose those bombastic words in the Goa Legislative Assembly in response to a ‘Calling Attention Motion’ moved by his bitterest critic then, Vijay Sardessai.
But when Parrikar did write that innocuous letter to Yedurrapa, Sardesai was his ally in the cabinet and obviously chose to stay silent. When the award came in August 2018 too, the Goa Forward Party chief joined Parrikar to hail the tribunal’s decision as a ‘Victory for Goa’ while he is now in the forefront to slam current chief minister Pramod Sawant when the same award is inevitably notified by the Centre.
An ecological
NIGHTMARE
Crux of the Mhadei matter for Goa, meanwhile, is not the politics of it but the trail of ecological destruction it could leave along the nearly 81-kilometre meandering course the river runs in Central and North Goa, from Sattari in the East to Panajin in the West where it finally meets and flows into the Arabian Sea at Miramar.
The Mhadei river originates in Karnataka and flows into Goa. It runs 28.8 kms of its course in Karnataka, and flows along 81.2 kms in Goa after briefly flowing in a contiguous part which falls in Maharashtra.
What diverting it’s waters in Karnataka will do, every green activist is convinced, is spell a death knell for one of the World’s most well known biodiversity hotspots - the Western Ghats - and inflict an as yet unknown and undetermined ecological disaster in the river-hugging Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary, and worse still, destroy through rise in salinity due to the intrusion from the Arabian Sea, the numerous Khazan and Mangrove dotted mini ecosystems in Goa fed by the river.
“Goa’s loss will be unimaginable,” according to a distraught Rajendra Kerkar, unarguably one of the few environmentalists who unflinchingly crusaded for the cause of Mhadei in tandem with former minister Nirmala Sawant.
The genesis of the Goa-Karnataka dispute over Mhadei goes back to what happened over four decades ago when in 1973, Karnataka proposing a hydro-electricity project in the basin.
In the 47 years since, nine of Goa’s Chief Ministers including Parrikar, stoutly defended Goa’s interests. Which is why, Parrikar’s inexplicable letter of December 2017, turned the waters of the Mhadei, even more muddier and “disturbing” in the words of Kerkar.
Dispute since 1973
Objections raised by Goa to the hydro-electric project proposed by Karnataka in 1973, and the fact that it was an Union Territory then, found favour with the Centre and the power project got shelved. Yet Karnataka did not give up its claim over the waters of Mhadei and fifteen years later in 1988 proposed to divert 3.85 tmc of water from Katla and Palna tributaries of Dudhsagar river to the Supa reservoir in the Kali river basin.
It also simultaneously sought to divert from sources of the Khandepar river to the Supa reservoir 1.06 tmc water. It’s plans however hit a roadblock with the then PDF government in Goa headed by Dr Luis Proto Barbosa vehemently opposed diversion of the Katla and Palna tributaries. The Modi government’s ambitious but much criticised dream project of linking rivers across the Nation could also explain the Centre’s complicity in the more recent flip-flop of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change when it first gave a virtual green nod to the Kalasa-Bhandura project and later held it in abeyance.
The story didn’t end there. In 1994, in a favourable political climate with Congress governments in Goa, Karnataka and the Centre, the hydro-electricity project was resurrected. But stiff resistance from Goa ended with the Chief Ministers of the two States -- the late Dr Wilfred de Souza and Veerapa Moily -- hold a joint meeting and appoint NEERI to study the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) of the Mhadei Hydroelectricity Project proposed by Karnataka. It again got shelved but it wasn’t the end.
In 1996, Karnataka’s irrigation minister visited Goa and opened a new front -- the Kalasa-Bhandura Project. This is the very project that raised the heckles between the two States and finally landed the dispute for adjudication before the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal.
If in September 2002, Parrikar as CM could ignore the internal power-play of the BJP’s politics and force the hand of the Vajpayee government to block an April 30, 2002 Ministry of Water Resources ‘in principal clearance’ to Karnataka to divert 7. 56 tmc feet of water from Mhadei basin, what is it that forced him in December 2017, to do exactly the reverse and write the innocuous letter?
The cue, obviously, lies in the alacrity with which BS Yediyurappa flaunted the letter on the electoral turf of North Karnataka less than 72 hrs after Parrikar had written it.
It was Yediyurappa as Deputy CM of Karnataka who had laid on October 2, 2006 the foundation stone of the Kalasa Project at Kankumbi. Wouldn’t he then claim credit for promising fruition of the project? That’s where the innocuous letter of Manohar Parrikar fits into the jig-saw puzzle.
Whether the Mhadei is being used as a test case, to be later show-cased and canvass in favour of river-linking on a larger National scale is a possibility not being ignored by Goa’s greens who had been crusading for the Mhadei to be left alone.
None-the-less, it’s clearer than the waters of Mhadei, Mahadeyi or Mandovi or whatever other name you call it by, that the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal award is not the last we will hear of the 47-year-old dispute and it’s over to the new battleground in July - the Supreme Court of India.
WILL POLITICS PIP
JUDICIARY?
But beyond the political playground, the logjam over Mhadei’s waters is a web of judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings. Now that the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal’s award is notified, the ball is well and truly in the Supreme Court of India, where all the three States involved - Goa, Karnataka and Maharashtra - have separately challenged various aspects of the Tribunal’s award.
The Supreme Court had also adjudicated the matter after Nirmala Sawant, who headed the Mhadei Bachao Abhiyan, had filed a petition on January 8, 2009 alleging that the Kalasa-Bhandura project is continuing without any approval under the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 and other related clearances from the MoEF.
The Supreme Court disposed this petition only after the Counsel for Karnataka Fali Nariman submitted a written assuarance that no work will be carried out until all requisite permissions are obtained from the MoEF, which the current Advocate General Devidas Pangam claims Karnataka is legally bound to respect till date.
Until then, brace yourself for unabated tu-tu, mein-mein, from Goa’s politicians and political parties.
