Every summer, the same script plays out across southern India. Reservoir levels fall, an inter-state river becomes a battleground, and politicians on each bank accuse their neighbours of stealing water that was never really theirs to begin with. This year, the Tungabhadra is in the spotlight, with Telangana pressing the Centre to secure a share it says it is being denied. But the deeper story is bigger than any single river.
The architecture of India’s water sharing was built for a different era. Tribunal awards and allocation figures were fixed decades ago, often on the basis of average flows that the climate no longer reliably delivers. When the monsoon underperforms, the gap between what a state was promised on paper and what actually reaches its fields becomes a political wound. The Tungabhadra dispute, where Telangana is allocated nearly 16 TMC but receives a fraction of it, is a textbook example.
Part of the problem is not law but neglect. The choke point at the Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme is silt, not statute. An expert committee flagged the need for desilting more than two decades ago, and the work still has not been finished. No tribunal can conjure water through a channel clogged with sediment. This is a failure of maintenance and coordination, and it is entirely fixable — if states and the Centre are willing to act before the crisis rather than during it.
That points to the real reform that is needed. Water management in shared basins cannot remain hostage to the electoral calendar, where every shortfall is an opportunity to blame the state next door. We need basin-level institutions with the authority and budget to maintain infrastructure, measure flows transparently, and arbitrate disputes in real time, not years later through litigation.
None of this is glamorous. Desilting canals and publishing honest flow data will never match the appeal of a defiant speech about defending the state’s rights. But farmers in tail-end villages do not eat speeches. They need assured releases they can plan their crops around.
The way out of the South’s recurring water wars is not louder rhetoric or harder bargaining. It is boring, patient, cooperative engineering and governance. Until states treat shared rivers as common assets to be managed rather than spoils to be fought over, every dry summer will bring the same quarrel, and the same losers.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
Leave a Reply