Cauvery award: Centre sets up temporary panel

The Centre has issued a notification constituting an interim high-level supervisory committee headed by the Union water resources secretary to implement the final award of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT). 

The panel will comprise chief secretaries of the Cauvery basin states — Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Puducherry and Kerala — and the chairman of the Central Water Commission as its members. The chief engineer of the Central Water Commission will be its member secretary. The headquarter of the panel will be in Delhi and the first meeting of the panel is scheduled on June 1.

The panel will decide flow of water to Tamil Nadu from Karnataka as per the CWDT’s final award. The Ministry of Water Resources has already sent intimation to all the riparian states to attend the meeting with facts and figures about requirement of water for drinking and agriculture purposes. 

According to the notification the Cauvery Water (Implementation of the Order of 2007) Scheme, 2013, issued on May 22, the primary task of the committee is to implement the CWDT’s award on sharing of water among Cauvery river basin states.
Interim arrangement

“The committee will be a purely interim arrangement to implement the final award of the CWDT, and it will function till the permanent body, the Cauvery Management Board (CMB), as recommended by the Cauvery Tribunal, is constituted,” a senior official in the Water Resources Ministry told Deccan Herald.

However, the notification also says that despite the committee’s direction on the issue of water sharing among the riparian states, any aggrieved parties can approach the Supreme Court for appropriate directions.

The supervisory panel was formed followinga recent direction from the Supreme Court, which had asked the Ministry of Water Resources to constitute the panel to implement the final award of the tribunal as an interim arrangement till the formation of the Cauvery Management Board.