Cauvery row: Reduce quantum of water to be released, Karnataka to plead

Bengaluru, Sept. 10: Karnataka will on Monday plead before the Cauvery Supervisory Committee to reduce the quantum of water to be released to Tamil Nadu.

The committee was constituted by the Centre in 2013 to decide on the amount of water Karnataka would be required to release each year depending on the availability of water and the needs and demands of the two states.

A source close to Water Resources minister M.B. Patil told OneIndia that Patil on Saturday met Fali S. Nariman, who heads the Karnataka legal team on the issue, to decide on the next course of action after the Supreme Court ordered the state to release 15,000 cusecs of water everyday for ten days.

The Karnataka government is likely to file a modification petition in the apex court asking the court to reduce the amount of water to be released by at least 2,000 cusecs a day.

The Tamil Nadu government had on Sept 7 approached the Union Water Resources ministry and demanded 64 tmc-ft of water from Karnataka, rather than the 50 tmc-ft it had demanded earlier, claiming that the Siddaramaiah government was 'misrepresenting facts' on water availability in the two states.

Karnataka had earlier said that it was facing a crisis of even drinking water in the Cauvery basin while Tamil Nadu had enough water in the Mettur to meet the needs of its Samba crop.

The source said that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had accused Karnataka of concocting figures of rainfall and storage in the Mettur reservoir.

In response, Karnataka Chief Secretary Arvind Jadhav has filed an objection to Tamil Nadu's fresh claims. In his letter, Jadhav has said that it was the unanimous opinion of all the political parties in the state that the order of the Supreme Court would have been different had an expert report on the ground realities in the Cauvery basin been available to it.

The source also said that while Siddaramaiah had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene and call a meeting of riparian states to resolve the issue amicably, the Centre is unlikely to do so since the matter is subjudice.

But Karnataka is hoping that the Supervisory Committee will send a fact-finding team to study the ground reality in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the source added.

OneIndia News