Rivers are assets of nation, not any one state, says Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court of India has ruled that waters of inter-state rivers are national assets and no single state can claim full rights over it.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 17 Feb 2018, 03:19 PM
Updated : 17 Feb 2018, 03:19 PM

The Supreme Court ruling on Friday extinguished origin states' claim of exclusive rights over the waters of an inter-state river, reports the Times of India.

"(Rivers) Being in a state of flow, no state can claim exclusive ownership of such waters or assert a prescriptive right to deprive other states of their equitable share," the report quoted a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

The chief justice, however, said the principle of equality did not imply equal division of water, but equal consideration and economic opportunity for the cobasin states.

The top court put the principle into practice to allow an additional 10 thousand million cubic feet (tmcft) of Cauvery water to Karnataka, taking into account the fact that TN could access 10 tmcft of the 20 tmcft of groundwater available in the Cauvery basin.

The Cauvery, with its origin in Karnataka, flows into the Bay of Bengal through Tamil Nadu.

The Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are in dispute over sharing the water of the river for a long time.

The chief justice narrated the gradual shift of the international river-water-sharing principle from the 'Harmon Doctrine' to the more equitable sharing propounded in the Helsinki Rules of 1966 and Berlin Rules of 2004, the Time of India said.

The 'Harmon Doctrine', based on an opinion of former US attorney general Judson Harmon issued a century ago, holds that a country is absolutely sovereign over the portion of an international watercourse within its borders, according to the report.

Bangladesh also shares a number of rivers with India, and water-sharing is a longstanding issue between the two countries.

The two neighbours signed a treaty on sharing the water of the Ganges river in 1996, but a deal on sharing the water of the Teesta river is stuck for years due to objection by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Mamata claims her state will be in problem if they give Teesta water to Bangladesh while the central government cannot move forward with the deal without her consent.