Inter-state Transboundary Water-Sharing in India

Conflict and Cooperation

N. Shantha Mohan and Sailen Routray

 

River Systems of South India (From a Map Made in 1886)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

Water is no respecter of boundaries. Most of the larger rivers in India meander through the administrative boundaries of the Indian federal system. Sometimes, the river itself is the boundary, such as the Indravati which delineates the boundary between Maharashtra and Chhattishgarh for a part of its flow. Some rivers mark metaphorical boundaries as well—River Ganga serves as the vehicle to heaven, whereas River Vaitarani marks the crossing from this world of mortals to the infernal one.  Therefore, in a fundamental sense, all rivers are transboundary in nature.

 

But for our somewhat mundane discussion, it is the wayward rivers that do not obey the diktats of human cartographic exercises that end up being marked and categorized as transboundary. For this discussion, the rivers that arise in one province in India but end up in other are termed as such. All of the longer and major rivers in India are transboundary rivers: Mahanadi originates in Amarkantak in Chhattishgarh and crosses over into Odisha before finding its way to the Bay of Bengal; Chambal rises near Mhow in Madhya Pradesh before meandering for more than 900 km to the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh after having acquired a formidable reputation as the river of the badlands. 

 

Chambal is an example of a long river (with a length of around 960 km) that complicates the ways in which rivers in India are clubbed together and categorized. It arises in the central highlands and drains into the River Yamuna which, in turn, joins the Ganges. Thus it forms part of the larger Gangetic river system. But it is difficult to locate it within the four-fold categorization of rivers into Himalayan, peninsular, inland and small coastal ones flowing into the Arabian Sea.

 

Ganga, Yamuna, Son, Gandak, Brahamaputra, Lohit and Teesta are the major Himalayan Rivers. Large parts of the water that these Himalayan rivers receive is from the snowmelt during summer, and therefore, these are perennial in nature. Most of the larger rivers in peninsular India are east flowing, apart from a few exceptions such as the Narmada and Tapti that drain into the Arabian Sea. The important east-flowing rivers of peninsular India are Subernarekha, Mahanadi, Brahmani, Godavari, Krishna, Kavery and Pennar. 

The Western Ghats form an important watershed for the southern part of the country and, apart from the several east-flowing rivers that originate here, many small and fast-flowing rivers such as Zuari, Mandovi, Netravati and Periyar originate here and, after flowing fast for a short distance, drain into the Arabian Sea. Most of the other rivers in India are transboundary. This is true both for larger rivers such as the Ganga and smaller rivers like Penner. Rivers such as Ghaggar and Luni do not find an outlet into the sea and lose their way in the desert wastes of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

 

A large number of transboundary rivers have significant implications for water usage and policymaking.  This is especially so because India has around 16 per cent of the population and 2.45 per cent of the land area of the world but only 4 per cent of its water resources. In gross national terms, the availability of water can be termed comfortable. But this situation can change with increased demands due to the changing patterns of economic growth and urbanization. 

Availability of water can greatly vary in terms of both spatial and temporal aspects. Spatially speaking, the northern and eastern parts of the country are better endowed as compared to the western and southern parts. The less endowed regions are the arid areas in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. They lie in one rain-shadow region or the other (Iyer 2003).

 

India has a monsoonal climate and the average annual rainfall is 1,170 mm. The annual rate varies from less than 150 mm per year in northwestern Rajasthan to more than 10,000 mm per year of rainfall in Meghalaya. A large part of the country receives rain for only 100 hours a year. More than half of the precipitation is received in a rainfall of less than about 20 hours (Agarwal and Narain 1999). Therefore, the storing of water for later use is of utmost importance. It is this imperative to store water that creates the potential for conflicts over transboundary rivers.

 

As noted, India has only 2.45 per cent of land resources and 4 per cent of water resources of the world. India supports 16 per cent of the human population and 15 per cent of the livestock population of the world. India gets around 4,000 billion cubic metres (BCM) of precipitation in an average year. Out of this, 3,000 BCM is received as rainfall in the summer monsoons spread over around 14 weeks, and the average annual water potential is around 1,869 BCM, out of which only 690 BCM can be harnessed due to hydrological and geological limitations. 

Replenishable groundwater resources are estimated at about 433 BCM. Thus, the total utilizable water potential stands at around 1,123 BCM. The utilization now stands at around 605 BCM, out of which irrigation accounts for more than 80 per cent. Domestic, industrial, energy and other sectors consume around 30 BCM, 20 BCM, 20 BCM and 34 BCM respectively. The assured utilizable quantum of water of the country is around 1,123 BCM, whereas estimations of water needs for the year 2050 put this quantum at 1,447 BCM. 

The total storage capacity is 213 BCM from projects already completed. Storage capacity of around 76 BCM is under construction. A large number of corrective measures need to be taken for appropriate regulation and improvements in efficiencies. Due to the spiraling water demand, there is an increasing pressure to create storage facilities on rivers, of which most of the larger ones are interstate transboundary rivers (Jeyaseelan 2010).

 

Conflict and Cooperation over Transboundary Rivers in India

 

A large number of rivers in India flow across international and interstate boundaries, and many of these are sources of potential conflicts. But the experience around sharing of both international and interstate transboundary river waters is not all grim. The Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan that came out of a process of mediation, facilitated by the World Bank, is an important example of a working and successful resolution of disputes over an international  transboundary river to which India was a party. 

The treaty awarded nearly 80 per cent of the water of the river system to Pakistan and 20 percent to India. The treaty has survived three wars between the two countries, showing that such a treaty can weather even the worst of situations in a politically volatile region. The dispute between India and Bangladesh over the Ganga, especially the one surrounding the Farakka barrage was addressed with the signing of a 30-year water sharing treaty in 1996. This was an important step towards figuring out mechanisms for sharing the waters of other transboundary rivers between the two countries on a mutually acceptable basis (Mohan 2010).

 

Examples of successful dispute resolution in the case of river–water sharing are to be found with regard to interstate transboundary rivers as well, such as the Damodar, Gandak and Subarnarekha. A salient example is the understanding reached on complex issues pertaining to the  multi-basin and multipurpose Parambikulam-Aliyar Project, where a Joint Water Regulation Board has been established by the riparian states. But it must be mentioned here that  these examples aside, there are many instances of interstate disputes over water sharing that are facing serious situations of potential conflict (Mohan 2010).

 

As the preceding discussions indicate, though India has a long history of cooperation over interstate transboundary rivers, its recent history is fraught with conflicts. There has been bitter fighting over the waters of Yamuna, Krishna and Cauvery.

 

Yamuna is the longest tributary of the Ganges and is a vital source of water for irrigation and urban use in northern India. It feeds the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi. The total present claims on the river are more than twice the total water available. Its waters were shared between Uttar Pradesh and Punjab until 1954, when the new state of Haryana was created by slicing off a part of Punjab. Now Uttar Pradesh controls the Eastern Yamuna Canal and Haryana the Western Yamuna Canal. 

Following the rising demand from an explosively growing and urbanizing state of Delhi, this arrangement was increasingly brought into question, leading to conflicts between Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh over the sharing of the Yamuna water, especially during the lean summer months. Matters have landed up in the courts including the Supreme Court of India through the public interest litigation route. With water demand continuing to grow in the basin states, especially in Delhi, there is very little chance of the dispute coming to a closure soon (Swain 2010).

   

In peninsular India, the Krishna waters have long been the cause of disputes. It is the second-longest river in the south and feeds the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The reorganization of these states on a linguistic basis in the 1950s questioned the validity of the 25-year agreement on Krishna (1951), which divided the river between the then Bombay, Hyderabad, Mysore and Madras states. The Krishna Dispute Tribunal headed by Justice Bachawat gave its award in 1976, asking the states to utilize their allocations by the year 2000. 

This led to a race for utilization of the river’s water. One of the repercussions of such a process has been the growing demands and attendant conflicts, exemplified in the conflicts between Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka over the Almatti Dam in the latter state. The cause of the dispute was Karnataka’s decision to raise the height of the dam from its original 519 m to 524.25 m, a step that would have reduced the capacity of the Nagarjunasagar and Srisailam projects in Andhra Pradesh. 

But the two states were quick to join hands to oppose Maharashtra, the upper riparian state, when it tried to increase its storage capacity for the waters allocated to it. The states concerned have been complaining about each other to the central government over the issues. With increasing intensity of resource utilization, such conflicts can only increase, since the overutilization of waters of the Krishna river basin is about  the highest in peninsular India (Swain 2010).

 

Cauvery is another southern river whose waters have been the cause both of cooperation and conflict over a period of time. The regions of the present-day Tamil Nadu were the first movers in using the water of the river. Before the growth of modern dam-building technologies, the upland areas, which today is the state of Karnataka, used very little of its waters. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, attempts by the then Mysore princely state to dam and use the waters of Cauvery River led to protests from the Madras Presidency of the British Raj. 

Negotiations between the two followed, and a treaty signed in 1892. This agreement put on record the projects already taken up and laid down that the Government of Mysore will undertake no new projects. When Mysore proposed the construction of the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam on the Cauvery, the Madras Government challenged the decision and sent a complaint to the arbitration committee set up under the agreement of 1892. 

On receiving an unfavourable judgment from the committee, the Government of Madras took the matter to the secretary of state in 1919 and got a favourable response. Soon after this, matters were again taken up for negotiation between the two governments and a 50-year agreement was reached in 1924. This agreement allowed the construction of the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam in the then Mysore state and the Mettur Dam in Madras Presidency. It also provided a framework for the development of irrigation in the Cauvery basin. 

This agreement was supposed to be renewed after 50 years, that is, in 1974, but this was not done. This 50-year period saw the intensification of irrigation development in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu , the successors of the princely state of Mysore and the British Indian province of Madras respectively. The increase in the intensive use of water, especially for irrigation, led to conflicts. Tamil Nadu, which had enjoyed the advantage of being the first mover in irrigation development, now started complaining about the overuse of the waters of the Cauvery by Karnataka, the upper riparian state. 

It started demanding the creation of a tribunal for the resolution of these disputes and sharing of the waters of Cauvery. In 1990, the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was set up, which came out with its award in 2007. The Government of Karnataka was dissatisfied with the award (Settar 2010). 

  

Rules and Mechanisms to Address Transboundary Water-Sharing in India

 

The foregoing section shows that the history of interstate river-water sharing has been characterized by both cooperation and conflict. Water conflicts are of many types, depending upon the perspectives of the contesting parties and the nature of the contest. The complexity of the issues is exacerbated by the deficiencies in the legal and institutional mechanisms. Irrigation as a sector consumes more than 80 per cent of all available water in the country. 

Listed as Enry 17 under the State List in the Constitution, it is subject to the provisions of Entry 56 of the Union List. The latter empowers the central government to legislate on interstate river issues. But this entry has been underused. Article 262 of the Constitution provides for an adjudication role by the centre in these conflicts. The Inter-State Water Disputes Act (ISWD), 1956 was promulgated under Article 262. This Act provides for the formation of tribunals for settling transboundary river disputes (Mohan 2010).

 

According to the provisions of the ISWD Act, a state government having a dispute with another over interstate river waters can ask the centre to se up a tribunal for adjudication. The tribunal is to comprise a chairperson and two members. These three persons, to be nominated by the chief justice of India, must be judges of that august court at the time of nomination. The tribunal is empowered to appoint assessors whose task would be to assist in the investigation and to advise the tribunal. 

The Act mandates the publication of the tribunal’s award. Its decision is final and is binding on the parties to the dispute. The tribunals set up for settling the disputes surrounding the Krishna, Godavari and Narmada rivers are perceived as having been relatively successful. But the efficacy of tribunals to settle such disputed rivers is coming increasingly under question.

There have been substantial problems surrounding the tribunals set up to settle the disputes over  the waters of Ravi-Beas and Cauvery. The awards in both the cases have failed to resolve the disputes and have led to further bouts of intense politicking. The tribunal’s award now has the status of the decree of the Supreme Court, by virtue of the recent amendments to the ISWD Act. The tribunals take a lot of time to reach a final settlement.

Even the amended Act of 2002 mandates a time limit of six years. But even six years is, relatively speaking, a long period of time to resolve such issues. In this context, a mention must be made of several non-official civil society efforts that have been working assiduously to address the issues concerning river-water sharing. The Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai,  initiated the setting up of a platform to facilitate dialoguing between the farmers of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the Cauvery Basin. Thus, by talking to each other, the farmers have started to understand each other’s problems and needs (Mohan 2010).

 

Addressing Transboundary Water Conflicts

 

In this context, we list some ways that can be of some help in addressing issues of transboundary water conflicts. The first path is of an institutional nature. We suggest that the already existing institutions, as also the formation of new institutions, such as river basin organizations (RBOs) can go some distance in resolving water conflicts. We also need to use some new tools or use old tools differently to be able to deal with water conflicts creatively. In this regard, we list mediation and an alternative approach to scenario building as two possible ways. 

 

The Interstate Council

 

Article 263 of the Constitution envisages the establishment of an Inter-State Council (ISC) with the mandate to enquire into and give advice on disputes arising between states, to investigate subjects of common interest to the states and to offer recommendations for better coordination of policy and action among the states concerned. The Administrative Reforms Commission (1969), the Rajamannar Committee (1971) and the Sarkaria Commission (1983) in their reports recommended the setting up of the ISC. 

The ISC was finally established by a Presidential Order on 28 May 1990 as a recommendatory body to fulfil the already mentioned constitutional mandate. The council comprises the prime minister, all chief ministers, administrators of union territories, six ministers of the central cabinet as also permanent invitees. The ISC secretariat, which provides organizational support to the council, is headed by a secretary who is also the secretary of the Commission on Centre–State Relations. He is assisted by two advisers and additional secretaries.

 

Conducting relevant studies is also a mandatory task of the ISC. Studies have already been commissioned on providing compensation to resource-bearing states; sub-national governance; and an appraisal of measures taken to implement the Directive Principles of State Policy. The council provides a forum for discussions on complex public policy and governance issues having a bearing on centre–state relations or having interstate dimensions. 

Because the council is a statutory body and has now built a body of experience in dealing with matters that are of common interest to states, it can play a useful role in facilitating dialogues and discussions towards resolving conflicts surrounding transboundary water-sharing in the country (Iyer 2002, Mohan 2010, ISC 2011).

 

River Basin Organizations

 

There is a need to look at arbitration and negotiations as methods of conflict resolution. One institutional arrangement that can be used to facilitate negotiation surrounding interstate rivers is the RBO. RBOs can be set up under the River Boards Act of 1956 (RBA), which was legislated under Article 56 of the Union List. These are empowered to regulate and develop interstate rivers and their basins. 

The board is required to have members with expertise in irrigation, water and soil conservation, and finance. But river boards have not been established because state governments apprehend that the boards would impinge  upon their authority and power (Iyer 2007). However, in this era of coalition politics, states have started seeing the advantage as also the need to set up RBOs.

Mediation as a Method for Dealing with Transboundary Water Conflicts

To date, seven tribunals have been established to deal with disputes over the waters of transboundary rivers. But these have not always helped resolve the disputes in a satisfactory manner. These tribunals depend upon legal principles of arbitration. Their awards, although supposedly final and binding, have been challenged in courts, and the courts have entertained these challenges. The judicial process is essentially an adversarial process and damages the relationship between the disputants. 

In contrast, mediation is a process that employs a neutral person or persons to facilitate a process of negotiations between the disputing parties so as to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution. Mediators should not have any direct interest in the conflict or  have control over the process of mediation and its outcomes. The power is vested with the disputants, but the mediation process is flexible and informal and can draw upon the multidisciplinary perspectives of the mediators. 

On the subcontinental level, the World Bank played the role of mediator between India and Pakistan and succeeded in resolving the conflicts surrounding the rivers of the Indus basin. In the Zambezi River dispute, the Vatican negotiated to fruition an 11-nation agreement for the joint use and management of the river’s waters (Devi 2010).

 

Given these examples, there is an urgent need in India to deploy mediation as a tool for conflict resolution and participatory management.

Alternative Approaches to Scenario Building for Water

 

The manner in which scenario building in the water sector takes place reduced it to a mere ‘technical’ tool for prediction. Scenario building is not a tool for projection and need not be used as one. A scenario is essentially an imaginative exercise involving political and social choices. It is as much a tool for action as it is for thought.

While undertaking exercises of scenario building, one needs to take into account the physical qualities of water as a resource. Generally, in such exercises, the current patterns of consumption are taken for granted to arrive at projections of various likely demands in the future. Thus, these attempts are just tunnel vision exercises based on the current patterns to project possible future demands. We argue that there is a need for a completely different way of building scenarios. 

We need to hypothetically freeze the total available water or freeze the quantum at current levels of total consumption in a given region—the unit for  analysis—and build scenarios of alternative usage patterns. Thus, building a scenario should not be taken as merely predicting the total quantum of water that would be in demand at a future date. What one is trying to do is to plan as if water, and its characteristics as a life-giving resource, mattered (which, in fact, it does).

This will necessarily be a non-technocratic and democratic exercise, since what one is trying to simulate in this proposed alternative method is the social choices that we might want to make if water availability and/or consumption were to be frozen at some arbitrary point in the present. Such an exercise will help us unravel the assumptions that we make while making projections. Such an approach will also help us radically interrogate theories of risk society by positing scenarios as ‘designs’ (Routray 2010).   

 

***

 

Water is becoming an increasingly important site of contestation among the states in India because of the rapid rates of population and economic growth and because of increasing urbanization. The growing importance of coalitions at the national level and the related assertion of regional identities add to the intractability of the problems surrounding transboundary water-sharing in India. 

More often than not, such issues are a result of the focus on demand-side management. Many scholars have argued that emphasizing supply-side management might be one way of dealing with such issues. There is a lot of merit in this argument. But we need to undertake institutional innovations as well. The suggestions for setting up RBOs and giving a greater role to the ISC in dealing with interstate river issues should be given due consideration. 

With the changing political dynamics in the country, it should not be difficult to convince the states that the relationship between governments at the level of the states and at the centre is not a zero-sum game. Increasing roles for central institutions in dealing with issues emerging out of sharing the waters of the transboundary rivers does not necessarily mean a whittling down of the powers of the states. 

Second, as this essay has argued, one needs to creatively use the already existing tools (such as mediation and scenario-building exercises) for managing water resources of interstate rivers more effectively and democratically. The emergent solutions have to be context specific and have to borrow creatively from a bouquet of solutions. 

 

References

 

Agarwal, Anil, Sunita Narain and Srabani Sen (eds). 1999. The State of India’s Environment: The Citizen’s Fifth Report. New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.

 

Devi, Geetha M. 2010. Legal Framework for Resolution of Water Disputes. Paper presented at the National Consultation on Water Conflicts in India: The State, the People and the Future, 15–16 March, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

 

Inter-State Council (ISC). 2010. http://interstatecouncil.nic.in/, accessed on 1 September 2011.

 

Iyer, Ramaswamy. 2007. Towards Water Wisdom: Limits, Justice, Harmony. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

 

———. 2003. Water: Perspectives, Issues, Concerns. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications.

———. 2002. ‘Inter-state Water Disputes Act 1956: Difficulties and Solutions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(28): 2907–2910.

 

Jeyaseelan, R. 2010. ‘Regulatory Aspects in Water Resources Development and Management’, in Shantha Mohan, Sailen Routray, and N. Shashikumar (eds), River Water Sharing: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation in India, pp. 81–95. New Delhi: Routledge.

 

Mohan, Shantha N. 2010. ‘Locating Transboundary Water Sharing in India‘, in N. Shantha Mohan, Sailen Routray and N. Shashikumar (eds), River Water Sharing: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation in India, pp. 3–22. New Delhi: Routledge.

 

Routray, Sailen. ‘Water Conflicts and Scenario Building in Orissa: An Alternative Approach’, paper presented at Orissa Environmental Congress, 22–24 December, 2010, Regional Museum of Natural History, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.

Settar, S. 2010. ‘Kaveri in Its Historical Setting’, in N. Shantha Mohan, Sailen Routray and N. Shashikumar (eds), River Water Sharing: Transboundary Conflict and Cooperation in India, pp. 99–107. New Delhi: Routledge.

 

Swain, A. 2010. Struggle against the State: Social Network and Protest Mobilization in India. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.

Note: A version of this essay was  first published in 2012, by Academic Foundation in the volume Perspectives on water: constructing alternative narratives (edited by Lydia Powell and Sonali Mitra). Later its second avatar was republished as a chapter in the volume, 'Thinking about Water in Uncertain Times: State People and Conflicts' - a collection of essays on the water sector by Sailen Routray and N Shantha Mohan - published by Aakar Books, New Delhi, in 2020.