Water rows, disparities challenge federalism: PM

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today said that it was becoming easier to arrive at water sharing agreements with neighbouring countries than to manage river water disputes between various states.

Citing water sharing and regional disparities as a major challenge to federalism in India, Singh said: "It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that we have found it easier to manage bilateral agreements with neighbours on river water sharing than domestic disputes between states.''

Singh was referring to the contentious issues of water sharing between Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south and the equally volatile conflict between Punjab and Haryana is the north. Singh said besides water, the sharing of natural resources like hydrocarbons, minerals etc. was posing a major challenge to the federal structure of India.

Singh was speaking at the inauguration of the fourth international conference on federalism here today. The conference is being attended by delegates from 26 countries including President of Comoros and Swiss Confederation, Vice-President of Nigeria and Prime Minister of Ethiopia.

Singh said his government continues to have "some difficulty" in eliminating fiscal barriers to inter-state movement of goods and in the utilisation of natural resources. "This has posed a major challenge in the management of federal polity," he said.

Dwelling on the global situation, Singh said that economic integration of the regions and globalisation have been acted as a hormonising forces for past few decades. The Prime Minister said he could visualise how growing globalisation would make sovereign states irrelevant one day. "I wonder whether the day is not far away when the concept absolute sovereignty may itself come into question.''

This, he said, was likely to happen as the world faces major threats likes the global warming that transcends boundaries of the nations.