M arilingaiah, a farmer from Karnataka ’s Kuntanahalli village in Maddur taluk of Mandya district, has raised a nursery of paddy seedlings on his two-acre plot. He is waiting for water to reach his fields, which lie at the tail end of the Visvesvaraya irrigation canal system. The canal draws water from the Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) reservoir, located across the Cauvery river near Mysuru.
So far, the Tamil Nadu government has not announced when the Mettur dam will be opened, even as it continues its legal battle with Karnataka to secure Tamil Nadu’s share of the Cauvery water. At the 31st meeting of the Southern Zonal Council held at Mamallapuram and presided over by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. The government has strongly opposed Karnataka’s push to reduce water releases, pressing the Supreme Court to ensure strict adherence to the mandated 12,000 cusecs daily flow.
Joseph Vijay said the legitimate rights of lower riparian States and the livelihoods that depend on assured river flows must be fully protected.
With water to be released under the rotational cycle only as long as reservoir levels permit, State Sugarcane Farmers’ Association president Kurubur Shanthakumar questions whether the Karnataka government and its legal team were making a strong enough case for farmers and presenting the State’s position before the Cauvery water-sharing bodies — the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) and the CWMA — and the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, in Tamil Nadu, farmers in the Cauvery delta are facing a water crisis of their own. The State continues its legal battle with Karnataka to secure its share of the Cauvery water. Cheluvarayaswamy, met in Bengaluru and decided to release canal water in only four rotational cycles during the crop season, instead of continuously. This decision was taken to conserve reservoir storage and to ensure water availability for other needs, including for drinking. The State is also under pressure from the Supreme Court and the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) to share the limited water with Tamil Nadu in what is shaping up to be a distressing year.
Low storage at the Mettur dam, Karnataka’s failure to release a sufficient share of the water it received in June and July, and the Tamil Nadu government’s decision not to open the dam for irrigation on the customary date of June 12 have left large tracts of paddy fields barren. On August 19, the Cauvery Irrigation Advisory Committee, a regional body chaired by Karnataka Water Resources Minister N. This central body was set up in June 2018 by the Union government to handle water-sharing from the Cauvery among Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry. Farmers in Maddur taluk are also bracing for a confrontation with the State government over the proposed diversion of KRS water to the Cauvery Stage VI drinking water project for Bengaluru, which requires an additional 6 TMC (thousand million cubic feet) of water annually. The Cauvery Stage VI drinking water project is a ₹6,939-crore infrastructure initiative approved by the Karnataka government this February to supply 500 MLD (million litres per day) of Cauvery water to roughly 30 lakh residents in Bengaluru as well as the adjoining towns of Bidadi, Hoskote, Anekal, Devanahalli, and Nelamangala. Ordinarily, paddy is cultivated across 5.3 lakh acres in the Cauvery delta during the ongoing short-term Kuruvai season, followed by cultivation across 12.9 lakh acres during the longer Samba-Thaladi season, which begins with transplantation in late July or early August and ends with the harvest in mid-January. The area under paddy cultivation this year has fallen to 4.5 lakh acres, according to Tamil Nadu government data.
He says the legal team does not appear to have succeeded in convincing the authorities about the water crisis in Karnataka.
