"Tamil Nadu's bilateral outreach on Cauvery water dispute raises governance questions"
Article 262
Constitutional provision authorising Parliament to adjudicate inter-state river disputes and bar Supreme Court jurisdiction.
ISRWD Act, 1956
Statute enabling constitution of water disputes tribunals; amended in 2002 and 2019.
Inter-state river water disputes are among the most politically charged and constitutionally complex issues in Indian federalism. The constitutional framework is anchored in Entry 17 of the State List (Schedule VII), which gives states legislative competence over water, but Entry 56 of the Union List empowers Parliament to regulate and develop inter-state rivers in the public interest. This tension is resolved through Article 262 of the Constitution, which authorises Parliament to provide for adjudication of disputes relating to the use, distribution, or control of waters of inter-state rivers — and, crucially, to bar the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and other courts from entertaining such disputes.
Acting under Article 262, Parliament enacted the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956 (ISRWD Act), which provides the statutory mechanism for constituting tribunals when negotiations between states fail. The Act was amended in 2002 to introduce time limits for tribunal proceedings, and again in 2019 to establish a single permanent tribunal with multiple benches, replacing the earlier practice of constituting separate ad hoc tribunals for each dispute. The Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) was constituted under the 1956 Act and represents one of the longest-running and most contentious inter-state water adjudications in independent India.
The CWDT was established in June 1990 after 26 rounds of bilateral negotiations spanning over two decades failed to produce an agreement between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. This historical fact is itself significant: it underscores that direct negotiations between riparian states, without a binding adjudicatory framework, have a poor track record on the Cauvery. The Tribunal delivered its final award in 2007, allocating specific volumes of water to each basin state — Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Puducherry — and prescribing a monthly release schedule. The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment, modified the award in 2018, marginally adjusting Karnataka's allocation upward while broadly upholding the Tribunal's framework.
To implement the award and the Court's directions, two institutional bodies were created: the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC). …
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With reference to the constitutional framework for inter-state river water disputes in India, consider the following statements:
1.Article 262 empowers Parliament to provide for adjudication of inter-state river water disputes.
2.Article 262 also enables Parliament to bar the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in such disputes.
3.Water as a subject falls exclusively under the Union List in the Seventh Schedule.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
The Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) was established primarily to:
Consider the following statements about the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956:
1.Tribunals constituted under this Act can be approached directly by citizens affected by water shortages.
2.The 2019 amendment to the Act replaced multiple ad hoc tribunals with a single permanent tribunal having multiple benches.
3.Awards given by tribunals under this Act are final and binding, and cannot be challenged in the Supreme Court.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
The Mekedatu project, which has been a point of contention in the Cauvery dispute, refers to:
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