Citing Assembly elections in Karnataka, the Centre on March 30 had asked the Supreme Court to extend the deadline for implementation of the judgment by three months.
With a week to go for the deadline set by Supreme Court for the Centre to submit a draft scheme on the Cauvery river water, the Ministry of Water Resources is consulting with officials of Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB), a frontrunner model for the scheme.
It is learnt that Union Water Resources Secretary U P Singh met BBMB officials, including the Board’s chairman, on at least two occasions since the Supreme Court hearing on April 9, which set the May 3 deadline for the Centre.
“We have also been consulting legal and water experts to help us formulate the scheme,” a senior ministry official told The Indian Express.
An official at BBMB, who did not wish to be named, said that the Board has given the ministry feedback on how to improve functioning of the existing model on which BBMB is based. “The main point is that whatever shape the scheme takes, it has to be fully empowered like the BBMB, which is in complete charge of operations and maintenance,” the official said.
The BBMB team is learnt to have also told ministry officials that it should be a panel of technical experts rather than administrators, and it should be as streamlined as possible. “It costs to run such a board, and it is better to restrict the number of people to those who are knowledgeable, have experience, and are competent. They should then be paid adequately for doing the job right,” the official told The Indian Express.
The BBMB was constituted under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966, and is tasked with administration, operation and maintenance of Bhakra-Nangal Project, Beas Project and regulation of water supply from Sutlej, Ravi and Beas and supply of power generation from these projects.
The Board has a chairman and two full-time members – one from Punjab for power and another from Haryana for irrigation. It also has two nominated members from the Centre and irrigation secretaries of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
A Water Resources Ministry official told The Indian Express that the ministry is still in the process of finalising the scheme given the divergent views of the Cauvery riparian states. It is the nature of this scheme that has been under contention ever since the February 16 order of the Supreme Court re-apportioning Cauvery water.
Citing Assembly elections in Karnataka, the Centre on March 30 had asked the Supreme Court to extend the deadline for implementation of the judgment by three months. The Central government told the court that there are fears that any announcement on Cauvery may “vitiate the election process and cause serious law and order problems”.
In its application, the Centre had stated that there were differences between some of the parties on the subject and asked the court to clarify whether it was open to the Centre framing the scheme at variance with the recommendations of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) regarding the Cauvery Management Board (CMB).
The plea pointed out that the CMB, as recommended by the CWDT, was purely a technical body, and wanted to know if the Centre could modify its composition and include administrative and technical experts “for effective conduct of the business of the Board and considering overall sensitivity of the issues involved”.