No chief minister dares allow another state the use of a larger portion of the water from a river. Perhaps the only time a chief minister was brave enough to allow another state to take away a major chunk of water was in November 1963 when Dwarika Prasad Mishra, then chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, allowed Gujarat, led by chief minister Balwantrai Mehta, to take away a larger share of Narmada waters for constructing a dam that might have been the precursor of the present Sardar Sarovar project. The Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha rejected the generosity of the chief minister and began the long battle of denying Gujarat the use of Narmada waters.

Even the Constituent Assembly recognised that sharing of river waters was bound to be a touchy issue. K.T. Shah, a member of the Constituent Assembly, proposed that river waters be treated as a national resource and their controls be vested in a national authority rather than in the provinces from which the river flowed. The Constituent Assembly, however, preferred to leave the matter to the goodwill of the states and confined itself to empowering the Parliament to create the Inter-State Water Disputes Act and make water disputes non-justiciable should it so desire. As it turned out, water wars between states became quite commonplace even though it is only recently that they have involved the burning of property and killing of people. Many times, states did sign water sharing agreements.

Since Independence, over 125 inter-state agreements over water sharing have come into existence. These are usually those for which either some external force bullied the warring states into agreement or the projects were so small that there did not seem much point in fighting over the waters or where the economic benefits of sharing far outweighed the costs of being obdurate.

... contd.