Facts and fracas about water

Facts and fracas about water
Yoginder K.

The meeting of the National Water Resources Council was a waste of time.Chief ministers, water ministers, secretaries and chief engineers fromvarious states and their Delhi counterparts took part in it. There were over200 people. Civil servants who should know better seemed to have advisedtheir political masters badly. The brave statements made at Delhi wererelayed to the vernacular press in the state capitals and appeared on theinside pages. The national press dutifully reported that the initiative ofthe government was thwarted by chief ministers.

An interesting fact has, however, gone unreported. Three chief ministersmade the maximum noise against river basin organisations. Each hassubstantial regions which would suffer because of their intransigence. Noone has mobilised people in those parts of their states with all therelevant facts. In one case, the state should make every effort to get outof the trap of a paddy-wheat rotation, entirely dependent on excesswater.

The yield growth has stopped and, in one of its three agroclimatic regions,the farmers are really suffering because the soil is not suitable for thiskind of agriculture. Some diversification was taking place and incomes wererising with a tobacco/cotton and oilseed rotation. This is no longer thecase because of free water and subsidies for the wrong crops. The state islosing its elan because it is deliberately going back on its only source ofgrowth a diversified agriculture. The northern extreme and southern partsof the state will have to collaborate with adjoining states for waterdevelopment and drainage, but they do not have any clout and the stateshortsightedly refuses to embark on `sustainability' paths.

In another state in the South, the present establishment has the distinctionof creating an energy and water shortage in one of the best-endowed waterregions of India. The catchments of their rivers lie elsewhere, but theywon't collaborate with those states. The Dutch who have a lot of experiencehad told them there was no other way, many years ago, but that report mustbe gathering dust. Another state has invested its SDP equivalent in aproject which will never be completed if it does not collaborate with itsneighbours, but it won't do so and takes outmoded legalistic arguments. Soit goes on.

A little later, the Cauvery River Authority met under the Prime Minister'schairmanship. There was appareby Yoginder K. ntly no problem. Nobodyreported this because solutions don't make news. The annual `tamasha' onrecriminations around the interim award of the Cauvery Tribunal has nottaken place since the authority was set up. Dyspeptic critics in Delhi don'treport this; only that the problem has as yet not been solved. I was happywhen the authority was set up around the interim award of the tribunalbecause it followed a three-level pattern I had recommended in my Cauveryreport, from my experience of the Mekong accord in a chapter called``Turning Adversity to Advantage'' which never saw the light of day.

I was really worried when a famous Tamil politician attacked it as asellout, but all that was over when the chairman of the Raiyata Sangh in theTanjore delta welcomed the authority. When you are not talking at each otherthrough the press and are accosted with a factual counter, the problemgenerally sorts itself out. Incidentally, the Cauvery/Mekong formulation hasbeen repeated in a recent accord in the Iberian peninsula, which alsoresolved a difficult problem between Spain and Portugal. Large jamboreeswithout preparation do not work. Small groups solve problems.

The second meeting I want to talk about was organised by M. L. Sondhi,Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Sondhi, alifelong professor of diplomacy at the JNU, is a great follower of conflictresolution as a professional method of problem solution and called a meetingto discuss this problem in the water sector. The India Water Partnership,the Sardar Patel Institute and the Institute of Human Resource Developmentcollaborated with him and experts, NGOs, civil servants and business groupssat down with him for a day.

Vikhe Patel began the day by letting down his ministerial hair and puttingon his cooperator leader cap. He said the problem was intense, politicalinterests exaggerated it and there was a clear role for a `third force' tosensitise the country on facts, lobby for solutions, and study the situationon a continuous basis. Sondhi himself, in an excellent tour de force,brought out the role of vested interests in the obfuscation of the issues,the preoccupation of some institutions with trivia and the fact thatconflict resolution needed professional approaches. At the end of the day,it was decided to set up a group which would be a repository of existingdevelopments and studies and which would take positions of developments inthe water sector.