The Krishna lesson

River waters are contested ground, full of complexities and all the confusion that contending parties bring to them. And there is very little that brings any clarity to the debate. There are almost no grassroots initiatives that articulate a larger alternative agenda for water sharing, rights and use. It is instructive, therefore, to discuss one such initiative in the Krishna basin in Maharashtra.
The stage is set The Krishna is an interstate river, and true to the history of interstate rivers, is disputed. The Bachawat Tribunal was set up to decide on the sharing of Krishna waters between Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. The tribunal Award of 1975 stipulated that each state should utilise its specified share by the end of May 2000, after which date the unutilised share would become part of a pool available for further negotiation and redistribution.

As the deadline neared, all the states made frantic efforts to create as much potential as possible. In the late 1990s, the Maharashtra government set up a separate corporation, the Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation (mkvdc), primarily for raising funds from the public; but also for building massive lift irrigation schemes and storages in order to