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Crucial Cauvery meet today

By Gargi Parsai

NEW DELHI FEB. 9. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will chair the crucial sixth meeting of the Cauvery River Authority (CRA) here tomorrow to take a decision on the distress-sharing o f Cauvery water and the releases made by Karnataka into the Mettur reservoir in Tamil Nadu from September last.

All the four Chief Ministers of the riparian States — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Pondicherry — have confirmed their participation in the meeting.

At his last informal meeting with Mr. Vajpayee on January 13, after the scheduled CRA meeting was postponed for lack of quorum, the Karnataka Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna, gave the assurance that he would ensure six tmcft of water into Mettur in the next two months. Going by that assurance, so far, Karnataka has released 3.3 tmcft of water to Tamil Nadu.

The Supreme Court had ordered that the decision taken by the Prime Minister at the CRA meeting about the deficit in releases and any additional releases to be made by Karnataka to help save the standing "samba" crop in Tamil Nadu shall be final. The court also held that the CRA could be held even without the quorum of a minimum of three Chief Ministers.

Normally, the CRA meetings are preceded by the official-level Cauvery Monitoring Committee (CMC) meeting. In October last, with deficit in releases, Karnataka sought a scaling down of the quantum of releases due to distress, but the Supreme Court upheld the quantum of 0.8 tmcft per day till November 7, 2002, after which it allowed the State to reduce the releases as per the interim award of the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal. The issue was taken up by the official-level CMC in its November 25 meeting, attended by the Chief Secretaries of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Pondicherry and Chief Engineer, Irrigation, Kerala.

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