Proponents of a federal structure have one vital statistic up their sleeve when they talk about its success. They observe that over the last three centuries, the richest nation in the world has always had a federal structure. While the Dutch Republic was an economic powerhouse from the late sixteenth century through the mid-seventeenth century, it was followed by England from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and was then overtaken by the US from the late nineteenth century. The twenty-first century is expected to be dominated by China and India, both federal structures.
Two incidents involving Andhra Pradesh in the last month have highlighted the incompetence of the government at the Centre in protecting the sanctity of the federal structure. While one involves the handling of the Srikrishna Committee report on Telangana where the Centre has set off a war of attrition by deciding not to act and play a waiting game, the other involves the report of Justice Brijesh Kumar on the Krishna water dispute in which the government has been more than eager to notify the Act before waiting for clarifications from the contesting states — Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
The Srikrishna Committee report in its chapter on the way forward discusses the optimal solutions for resolving the Telangana issue. While delving into Option 5, which articulates two separate states of Telangana and Seemandhra with Hyderabad as the capital of Telangana, the report states that the matter should also be seen in the larger context of whether a region can be allowed to decide for itself what its political status should be, since that would only create a demand for a great number of small states resulting in problems of coordination and management. As the Srikrishna committee report has no constitutional authority, the onus is on the government at the Centre to use the report as a basis to make a quick, timely decision to resolve this matter.
It cannot be denied that market and business confidence has been severely hit as a result of the Centre’s insouciance in addressing the issue in a timely manner and the less-than-regular growth in the trade, hotels and restaurants, real estate and services sector is testimony to that.
Any inter-state river that does not have perennial flow, like the Krishna, has the potential for disputes among various stakeholders. The first Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal was constituted in April 1969 under the provisions of the Inter State Water Disputes Act, to resolve the dispute between Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and was headed by Justice Bachawat. The decision was delivered in December 1973 and a review of this decision was available after 2000. Justice Brijesh Kumar headed the review tribunal which submitted its report on December 30, 2010.
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The current award made by Justice Brijesh Kumar has departed significantly from the previous tribunal award. While the Bachawat tribunal had used a contiguous series of 78 water years, the current tribunal has decided to use a contiguous water series of 47 years to calculate average flows in the river. The dependability ratio, which is essential for water resource planning, has been reduced to 65 per cent from the previous panel’s suggestion of 75 per cent. This reduction in dependability allows the tribunal to make more allocations among all parties, increasing the risk of lower riparian states such as Andhra Pradesh receiving much lower flows in lean years when flows are below normal. In this scenario of decreasing the dependability ratio by 10 percentage points, Andhra Pradesh could have the potential of having 14 years between now and 2050 when the tribunal award comes up for review, where allocated flows will not be realised. On the other hand, the Maharashtra government is planning to seek a review of t he decision that permits Karnataka to raise the height of the Almatti dam from 519 metres to 524.6 metres.
With so many questions and clarifications from multiple parties, the Centre’s decision to notify the tribunal’s award at the earliest without waiting for clarifications sought by the contesting parties, departs from an engaging, participative approach and portrays a certain level of high-handedness. Though this decision is guided by Section 6(2) of the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956, which gives the Tribunal award the same force as an order of the Supreme Court after its publication in the official gazette, the Centre would have had nothing to lose if it decided to wait till the clarifications were filed by various states.
Democracy, like any other participative process, contains a great deal of symbolism. The gestures that are made between entities reflect the mutual respect that can lead to cooperation and synergies that may otherwise be difficult to achieve. The fundamental problem arises when the government does not know when to engage the stakeholders in a participative manner and when to draw the line while dealing with uncooperative, intransigent elements. The most common-sense thumb rule of evolving a consensus when the parties are interested in participating in an open, constructive dialogue seems to have been ignored.
The writer is chairman of Malaxmi Group.
He served as chairman of CII Andhra Pradesh (’09-’10) and is currently chairman of the Infrastructure and Logistics Federation of India, Andhra Pradesh