COVER STORY

CRA, CMC and Supreme Court

PARVATHI MENON
T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

The Cauvery River Authority (CRA) and the Cauvery Monitoring Committee (CMC) appear to have become disputation forums rather than the adjudicatory forums they were envisaged to be when they were set up under the Inter-State Water Disputes (ISWD) Act, 1956. The CRA has the Prime Minister as its chairperson and the Chief Ministers of the four Cauvery basin States of Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry as its members. An important aspect of the status of the CRA brought out by Ramaswamy R. Iyer in an article that forms part of this cover package, is that the CRA is a political rather than a technical or a professional body with a "consensus-promoting" function. The CMC plays a supportive role to the CRA, which is of monitoring the implementation of the Interim Order of 1991.

The CRA being a political body, its functioning reflects the Cauvery's turbulent politics. Neither Karnataka nor Tamil Nadu has endorsed the role and function of these bodies. In 1997, Karnataka rejected as flawed and discriminatory a draft scheme that mooted the idea of setting up an Authority under the ISWD Act, whereas Tamil Nadu met it with cautious optimism. The Scheme was notified on August 11, 1998. A few days before the notification, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee got the Chief Ministers of the four basin States to sign a limited agreement, which the BJP-led government hailed as a breakthrough in the dispute and a "historic accord" on water sharing. The political opposition in both States rejected the agreement, and its notification. The Jayalalithaa-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and its allies were furious over the notification, and later withdrew their support to the BJP-led government on this issue. Even the signatories to the accord had limited expectations from it. Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, who signed the accord on behalf of Tamil Nadu, called it a "gentlemen's agreement".

As it turned out, it took just one season of deficient rainfall to expose the limitations of the water-sharing agreement and it fell apart. Karnataka categorically refused to implement the recommendations of the Monitoring Committee in October 1999 to release 3 tmc ft of water immediately, and another 6 tmc ft soon after. The "historic" accord clearly did not address the substantive issues in the debate. It merely put in place the CRA and the CMC, bodies that could not break the political deadlock of the Cauvery crisis, let alone address its technicalities.

The CRA has met four times and has achieved little. Even its "consensus-promoting" function has been reduced to a farce. It has become the forum for Tamil Nadu to demand that Cauvery water be released to Mettur, and for Karnataka, from the standpoint of protecting its own interests, to refuse the demand. Jayalalithaa took the Supreme Court route owing to her government's disillusionment with the CRA. She walked out of the CRA meeting held in New Delhi on August 27 protesting the "intransigent and unreasonable attitude" of the Karnataka government in its refusal to release water despite Tamil Nadu's repeated requests, even when, according to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka had about 73 tmc ft in its reservoirs.

In June this year, the Tamil Nadu government in a press release listed four specific instances when Karnataka had refused to implement the decisions of the CRA and the CMC. Jayalalithaa said: "Nature may not come to our rescue always. Hence, the scheme needs to be modified with more powers to ensure effective implementation of the orders of the Tribunal. Only when a situation of crisis develops and there is a hue and cry from Tamil Nadu, there is an attempt to convene a meeting of the Monitoring Committee, and the Authority ostensibly waits with the fond hope that nature will take its course and the situation will pass over. As if to add insult to the injury, the Tamil Nadu farmers are being advised that they should not venture upon kuruvai cultivation since they know year after year that water will not be released until the October floods."