Rivers: sharing, linking and disputes

Prelims and Mains

The Home Minister has offered river linking as the answer that could keep India free of water shortage for a century. Every link is an inter-basin transfer, and the objection is that moving water to a basin in deficit creates a fresh claimant on water that already has users.

• The links are proposed under the National Perspective Plan of 1980 and worked up by the National Water Development Agency.
• A receiving region may demand its transferred water even in a distress year, at the cost of the original users.
• Tamil Nadu's requests for tribunals on the Pennaiyar in November 2019 and on Mekedatu in March 2026 are unanswered, one despite a Supreme Court direction.
• Demand side management is the alternative: conserve, reward efficient farm use, and curb groundwater drawn on free power.
• Ken-Betwa is the first link to be built, a 231 km canal carrying Ken water to the Betwa, with the Daudhan dam inside Panna Tiger Reserve.
• Ten villages will be submerged and twelve more displaced for compensatory afforestation.
• Adivasis in Chhatarpur allege eviction before compensation and irregular gram sabha consent.

Prelims and Mains

On the Ganga, India is the upstream State and Bangladesh the downstream one, which is the relationship the Brahmaputra puts India on the other side of. The barrage at Farakka in West Bengal is where that position is exercised, by a structure built for a purpose inside India rather than for the border. Bihar, upstream of it, has a complaint of its own.

• The Farakka Barrage diverts Ganga water into the Bhagirathi–Hooghly to keep Kolkata port navigable.
• Bihar blames it for trapping silt upstream, a contested claim.
• The 1996 India–Bangladesh Ganga Water Sharing Treaty, which shares the lean season flow at Farakka, expires in December 2026.

Prelims and Mains

The Chenab is a western river allotted to Pakistan, on which India may build only run of the river projects with little storage. India has held the treaty in abeyance since the Pahalgam attack, a step the treaty itself does not provide for.

Prelims and Mains

The Cauvery Water Management Authority implements the sharing of the river between Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry as fixed by the tribunal and modified by the Supreme Court in 2018, and Mekedatu is a dam Karnataka proposes on the river inside its own territory.

Prelims and Mains

The Mahanadi dispute between Chhattisgarh and Odisha went to a tribunal set up in 2018 under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956, and the States may instead settle it by negotiation.