While international water discourse is centred on ecological restoring of rivers, in India it is focused on interstate river water disputes. With 25 major rivers, mostly flowing across States, India has had to set up 9 Interstate River Water Disputes Tribunals of which 4 are in existence. With most tribunals long exceeding the 5-year time-limit, the Mhadei award of August 2018 came a full 8 years after the tribunal was instituted in November 2010. In the absence of an effective river water management framework, water sharing disputes across the country are only going to escalate with increasing water demand coupled with increasing pollution and losses reducing the availability of water. Climate change is likely to worsen the situation with changing precipitation patterns, increasing temperatures and sea level rise.
Regulating interstate rivers
For the optimum utilization of the country’s water resources while balancing the needs of individual States, the Constitution has included ‘Interstate Rivers’ in the Central List and ‘Water’ in the State list. By keeping interstate rivers under Central control, the Constitution empowered it to legislate for the regulation & development of interstate rivers, while ensuring that no State can claim exclusive right to utilize the waters of an interstate river by depriving another riparian state. Though the Centre enacted the River Boards Act and the Interstate River Water Disputes (ISRWD) Act after reorganization of states in 1956, the River Boards Act has remained a dead letter, while the ISRWD Act has been called into action several times. River Boards if created had high potential to avoid disputes by advising States on integrated development of interstate river basins. However by relying on the contingency-based dispute resolution mechanism, the Centre fostered a regulatory vacuum leaving the States with unrestricted access to the surface waters within their borders with hardly any consideration to the claims of other riparian states.
Community and
regional identities
Carriers of histories, cultures, trade and religious ideas, rivers are not just volumes of water but are inextricably linked to the complex dynamics of ethnic, community and regional identities of people inhabiting their basins. River water disputes are thus not just conflicts over a vital resource, but also identity contestations. Spun around these sensitive identities, river water disputes can acquire huge political hues depending on the political strength of the contesting states specially in the face of electoral benefits. In the case of Mhadei, diversion of 3.9 tmc (thousand million cubic feet) of water into Karnataka’s Malaprabha basin according to tribunal award duly challenged by Goa in the Supreme Court, is perceived as an identity affront, a compromise on the state’s economic interests and a sell-out of the river’s ecosystem. Considering that almost 68% of the river’s length upstream is saline, loss of fresh water from the Kalasa-Bhanduri streams could render the whole Mhadei salty. On the other hand, Karnataka is demanding its fair share of water based on faulty perceptions of ownership over water within its borders. And although the tribunal award has not apportioned each riparian state’s share in the total annual discharge of the river, dividing only a small portion for development purposes till 2048 in the absence of sufficient data and its evaluation, the situation reveals the consequencies of lack of an effective water management framework.
Imperative need
The world over the trend is integrated river basin governance treating the river as a complex dynamic socio-ecological system with links and feedbacks between the social and ecological component. The approach underlines the interconnections between the river’s natural flow and other elements of the ecosystem like lakes, underground aquifer, wetlands, mangroves, marshes, etc. And given that the river basin is embedded within a larger social system, it demands engaging the experience and knowledge of not just domain experts like water engineers but also interdisciplinary experts like sociologists, river ecologists, water historians, agriculture economists besides farmers and fishermen. This plurality of narratives can potentially transform the dispute-ridden hydropolitics of interstate rivers into mutually beneficial co-operation for prudent water management, addressing issues of environmental degradation and climate change challenges.
The Centre’s River Basin Management Bill, 2018 is an attempted shift towards integrated water management. But its proposed two-tier River Basin Authority (RBA) for interstate rivers consisting of a Governing Council of politicians from riparian states, and an Executive Council peopled with Central & State water bureaucrats and some environment experts is a far cry from what is really needed. River Basin Organisations (RBOs) which have successfully transformed highly polluted and heavily engineered transnational rivers like the Rhine, Thames and the Danube work with water governing frameworks which are autonomous and adaptive, have consensus-based decision-making mechanisms backed with a transparent & robust data and information sharing network, and give voice to all stakeholders including the local community. Notwithstanding the fact that RBOs struggle to maintain a balance between a basin development perspective and engaging local stakeholders who experience the impact of such management.
For Goa hope lies in ‘positive politisation’ of the issue through public sensitisation of the politics involved in water disputes, and the developmental hindrances, economic losses and environmental degradation resulting from prolonging them. This is a task for media, civil society, public intellectuals, academicians, social & environmental activists and ‘The Mhadei Bachao Andolan and Save Mhadei Save Goa’ initiatives are already involved in this. However both States will have to realize that a compromise-induced resolution based on sharing benefits arising from the preservation of the integrity and resilience of the Mhadei ecosystem rather than dividing its waters is a solution worth working for.
