When threats to water security loom large and control over rivers is used to score political points, conflicts are a natural outcome.
ET Bureau
On the way to Bandipora district, 65 km north of Srinagar, on a perilous road kissing the banks of Wular Lake, the Shamas Bari range of the middle Himalayas resembles a green screen sweeping into the sky. The drive to these mountains, which extend up to the Gurez Valley and further towards Ladakh, gradually peels back the beautiful facade to expose the blemishes marring the mountain range.
The most visible and prominent scar is the controversial 330 MW Kishanganga hydel power plant, built by hollowing out the mountain with a huge network of tunnels and underground structures.
The project dam is located at Badwan village of Gurez near Kanjalwan, which can be reached in an hour-and-a-half from Bandipora on a precarious road via Razdan Pass, 11,700 feet above sea level.
The Kishanganga river, a tributary of the Jhelum, is diverted from here towards Bandipora through a 24-km-long tunnel in the mountains, where it will be passed through three turbines in a massive power house located 2 km inside the mountains.
The water would then be flushed back into the Jhelum. The project, says a teacher in Gurez, looks like “unwanted and bad punctuation marks in a beautiful sentence”.
The power plant, whose cost has escalated by over 50% to `5,600 crore, was supposed to become operational in November but most of the work has been halted due to protests across Kashmir, after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.
The project is now likely to be commissioned in late 2017. Around 13% of the power generated here will be used by J&K and the rest by other northern states like Delhi and Punjab.
The run-of-the-river project, developed by the state-owned National Hydroelectric Power Corporation, has had a troubled history since construction began in 2007, and is again in the spotlight thanks to the Indian government using the renegotiation of the Indus Water Treaty as one of the pressure tactics with Pakistan, after four terrorists stormed an Indian Army base in Uri in Baramulla on September 18, and killed 18 soldiers. India has said that the terrorists had the backing of Pakistan.
Days after the attack, the spokesperson for the ministry of external affairs said: “For any such treaty to work, it is important there must be mutual trust and cooperation. It cannot be a one-sided affair.” This forced Pakistan to approach the World Bank, which brokered the treaty between the two countries in 1960.
The Indus Ruckus The treaty was a culmination of water-sharing negotiations between India and Pakistan since 1947.
It allowed India to use the three eastern tributaries of the Indus — the Ravi, Beas and the Sutlej — and asked India to let most of the western rivers — the Indus and its tributaries the Jhelum and the Chenab — flow into Pakistan. India is allowed limited use of the western rivers.
The treaty is the only agreement in the world that goes beyond water-sharing to divide transboundary rivers and has held strong through far more tumultuous times in India-Pakistan relations than now, including the wars of 1965, 1971 and 1999. That is why experts think calls to revisit or scrap the treaty are unreasonable.
Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, professor of earth sciences at the University of Kashmir, believes India cannot afford to seriously consider modifying the treaty. “The short-term measure is to the stop the water flow into Pakistan and we can do that if we don’t have a problem flooding towns in Kashmir.
We have not built infrastructure to store the water.” He adds that India’s entitlement of 20% of aggregate flow of the rivers is more than its requirement.
“India is harnessing only about 12% of the identified 20,000 MW hydropower potential of the western rivers.” India, however, optimally uses the eastern rivers, leaving very little to flow into Pakistan.
The Indus water system is crucial to Pakistan since two-thirds of its landmass falls within the basin and 90% of the water from it is used for agriculture.
Ahmad Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer based in Lahore, says there have been demands within Pakistan, too, for renegotiating the treaty.
In March, the country’s Senate passed a resolution to that effect. “While this sentiment is not new for Pakistan, it is new for India to take an official position,” says Alam.
Sidharth Nath Singh, national secretary of the BJP, says those who are critical of the government’s strategy to use the Indus Water Treaty in dealing with Pakistan are not looking at the interest of the country. (On the night of September 29, the Indian Army carried out “surgical strikes” on terrorist launchpads along the LoC.)
Pakistan has repeatedly opposed India’s hydel projects on the western rivers. For the first time since the treaty was signed, a neutral expert was appointed in 2005 to address Pakistan’s objections to the Baglihar dam, constructed on the Chenab in J&K’s Doda district for a 900 MW plant.
Pakistan objected to the design, claiming it would reduce the flow of the river into Pakistan. But the expert ruled in India’s favour.
Pakistan then went to the Court of Arbitration in The Hague, opposing the Kishanganga project, with the contention that it would affect flows to the Neelum-Jhelum hydel project downstream in Pakistan.
The court allowed India to go ahead with the project but asked it to ensure a minimum flow downstream all the time. Pakistan has also raised objections to an 850 MW hydel project on the Chenab in Kishtwar district of the state.
Alam calls the focus on hydel projects a red herring and insists the two governments look at issues like the exploitation of groundwater use in the basin.
Pakistan has often accused India of using dams as “water bombs”, without justification. “There is no possibility of using Kishanganga or any other project as water bombs as we don’t have any storage capacities or infrastructural capabilities to utilise the water if stopped. We can stop water only for four to six hours and that too will have domestic implications,” says an NHPC official at Kishanganga, requesting anonymity.
The locals do not care much for the politics around the treaty, but they fear that ultimately they might have to face the consequences of any decision made in New Delhi.
“We don’t understand the pros and cons of the treaty, but we may be the first sufferers of any decision, as we are right now,” says Ashiq Tantry of Kralpora village, near the project.
Former Union water resources minister Saifuddin Soz, a Congress politician from J&K, cautions hawks on their statements on the treaty.
“The moment you revisit the treaty, China will be party to the whole affair and being the upper riparian state it could take many initiatives.” The Indus originates in Tibet, as does the Brahmaputra.
China accounts for 8% of the Indus basin drainage and over 50% of the Brahmaputra, leaving India with the same fears about its upper riparian neighbour, particularly on the Brahmaputra, as does Pakistan on the Indus.
On October 1, China said it has blocked a tributary of the Brahmaputra for a hydel project in Tibet, adding to India’s concerns about China’s dam-building on the river.
Any adverse development on the Indus treaty could also impact India’s relations with other riverine neighbours like Bangladesh, with which it signed the 30-year Ganges Water Treaty in 1996, and is expected to sign a Teesta pact.
While the Narendra Modi government has to walk a fine line in dealing with its neighbours on river-sharing, it is faced with an even more onerous task of getting states to agree to amicably share waters.
Union water resources minister Uma Bharati has in the past two weeks met the chief ministers of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and a minister from Tamil Nadu to discuss disputes over the Mahanadi, Krishna and Cauvery. Besides these, there are at least three other major inter-state disputes over river-sharing and several other smaller ones. (See Major Ongoing Inter-State Disputes.)
In Hot Water While water is a state subject, when two states have a conflict over sharing a common river they approach the Centre. If the Union government fails to settle the dispute, a tribunal is set up.
India has had eight such tribunals, two of them for Krishna, which is shared by Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Telangana was carved out of Andhra in June 2014 after a long and bloody protest over Andhra’s denial to the region of its share of waters, among other grievances. Now, Telangana is upstream of Andhra on both the Krishna and the Godavari.
Andhra has objected to Telangana’s two large irrigation projects on the Krishna, but Telangana has responded by saying both these projects were conceived in united Andhra Pradesh.
Telangana has accused Andhra of using more water than it claims. The judgment of the second Krishna tribunal is awaited. In undivided Andhra Pradesh, Telangana got only 37% of the Krishna water allocated by the earlier tribunal despite it having 68% of the catchment.
“Nationally and internationally, water allocation is based on catchment area. Naturally, Telangana will get more water,” says T Harish Rao, Telangana’s irrigation minister. His Andhra counterpart was not available for comment.
Telangana’s neighbour Karnataka is engaged in possibly the most bitter inter-state fight on water with Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery. A tribunal appointed in 1990 gave its verdict in 2007 but the matter has since reached the Supreme Court.
The dispute is more than a century-old but every time it flares up, usually when the south-west monsoon is deficient, the agitation, particularly in Karnataka which lies upstream, turns violent.
The latest instance began when Karnataka refused to release water to Tamil Nadu in August, on the grounds that there was insufficient water in its reservoirs, which was challenged by Tamil Nadu in the Supreme Court.
The apex court directed Karnataka to release 15,000 cusecs of water a day (1 cubic foot per second = 28.3 litres per second) till September 15.
Despite protests, Karnataka managed to release 10,000 cusecs from a reservoir. But three days later, when the court ordered to release 12,000 cusecs a day till September 20, large-scale violence broke out in Bengaluru, with miscreants targeting vehicles and business establishments belonging to Tamils, and holding the city hostage.
Karnataka has refuted the order of the Supreme Court by saying that it does not have enough water to meet the drinking needs of Bengaluru and other regions in the state.
The Karnataka legislature passed a resolution to this effect, which binds Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to this decision.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ordered Karnataka to release 6,000 cusecs of water a day to Tamil Nadu till October 6 and directed the Centre to set up the Cauvery Water Management Board with representatives from the four Cauvery basin states by October 4.
Following the SC order, Opposition parties in Karnataka asked the government not to release “at any cost” 6,000 cusecs to Tamil Nadu, and to oppose the formation of the Cauvery Water Management Board.
Srinivas Chokkakula of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi says there is information asymmetry in the data produced by states. “There is not adequate data sharing between the states and the Centre.”
Political analyst S Mahadev Prakash says the Congress government in Karnataka failed to prepare itself for the Cauvery issue.
“It did not consult legal experts properly. This resulted in the Supreme Court giving judgments against Karnataka’s interests.”
Successive judgments favouring the release of water to Tamil Nadu has created a sense of distrust among the people of Karnataka, he adds.
Historian S Settar says there has to be fresh thought on how water can be shared, taking into account the needs of the people in the upper and lower Cauvery regions. “People in the lower Cauvery area have taken the water for granted. How to use water and how to share water are two different things.
Tamil Nadu can’t continue cultivating thrice a year, they will have to change their crop pattern. If everyone cultivates rice, sugarcane and banana, water supply will dry up.”
Settar, a professor at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Advanced Studies, adds Karnataka, too, needs to look beyond the Cauvery to meet its drinking water needs such as resurrection of the lakes and rainwater harvesting.
Karnataka is far from the only state that has not listened to the Supreme Court on matters of riversharing. After the apex court asked Punjab to complete the construction of a canal that would carry the waters of the Ravi and the Beas to Haryana, Punjab passed an Act in 2004 terminating its watersharing agreements with neighbours.
Punjab has now sought the establishment of a second tribunal. There have also been calls from the Opposition parties in Odisha for the state government to demand a tribunal to resolve its dispute with Chhattisgarh over the Mahanadi. Odisha has criticised Chhattisgarh’s plans to build barrages which, it says, reduce the flow to the Hirakud dam in Odisha.
“The monsoon flow accounts for 96% of the water in Mahanadi. Which means these projects will essentially be storing rainwater.
There will be enough water in the Mahanadi to fill the Hirakud dam seven times over even after these barrages are built,” Chhattisgarh CM Raman Singh told ET recently.
Chokkakula says the mechanisms for resolving inter-state disputes are dated. The Inter-State River Water Disputes Act was passed in 1956, when the Congress was in power at the Centre and in most states, which meant states would listen to the Centre.
“Since it was only a decade since Independence, there was a greater sense of nationhood.”
Chokkakula says now there has to be a different approach and the inter-state council could tackle river-sharing disputes (See Better Solutions for Water Battles).
The inter-state council met after a decade in July, the 11th time since it was set up in 1990.
As threats to water security loom large and control over rivers is used to score political points, conflicts are a natural outcome, both between states in the country, and between India and its neighbours.
The Centre, wherever possible, will have to prevent disputes from becoming intractable, and states would do best to not make rule of law a casualty to votebank politics.
A 2013 report “Water Cooperation for a Secure World” by the Strategic Foresight Group says that of the 148 nations sharing water resources, 37 do not cooperate for the management of water resources; if they do so, it is confined to the technical level. “The same 37 countries face risk of war for reasons other than water such as land, identity, ideology or history.”
The report also states that “any two countries involved in ‘active water cooperation’ do not go to war for any reason whatsoever”.
Now, the Indus Water Commission between India and Pakistan doesn’t involve such active cooperation (which could involve joint management of the water body and joint investments), as it is only about allocation of rivers. In times of cross-border terror acts and counter surgical strikes, there’s little comfort in that reality.
ET Bureau
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