Kerala moves SC opposing Cauvery tribunal's award

Complaining that it had been given a raw deal, the Kerala government has moved the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the February 5 award made by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal on distribution of the river water among the four southern states.

In a special leave petition filed before the apex court, Kerala has expressed apprehensions that the award, if allowed to be implemented, would seriously jeoparadise various irrigation projects planned by the state.

Accusing the tribunal of adopting an arbitrary and irrational approach while deciding the award, the state cited the allocation of a mere 30 TMCft (thousand million cubic feet) to it, as against its claim of 99.8 TMCft.

According to Kerala, even the allocation of 30 TMCft was entirely illusory, if one takes into account that the state has very generously given from its own basins 31.3 TMCft to the Cauvery basin area in Tamil Nadu. As a result, the net allocation for Kerala was now only 1.3 TMCft, the state claimed.

Kerala submitted that by denying trans-basin transfers, the tribunal had deprived it the opportunity of completing important projects like Banasurasagar, Mananthvady and Kerala Bhavani, which together required 35 TMCft of water from the Cauvery.

The tribunal adopted an arbitrary system of gauging, wherein Karnataka was required to release a fixed amount of only 192 TMCft at Mettur and keep the rest of the riparian water, while Kerala has to release all waters other than the limited amount allocated to it, the state said in the petition.

On February 6 this year, the CWDT gave its final verdict in the decades-old politically sensitive row, allocating 419 TMCft feet of water to Tamil Nadu out of 740 TMCft available in the basin but the actual release by Karnataka to Tamil Nadu would be only 192 TMCft annually.

In the final order running into over 1,000 pages in five volumes, the three-member tribunal headed by retired Justice N P Singh allocated 270 TMCft of water for Karnataka, 30 TMCft for Kerala and seven TMCft for Puducherry in a "normal" year.