He has said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should intervene to resolve the dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over water sharing.
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The chief minister said that it would be hard for a Constitution-bound state to deny the order of the Supreme Court or to refuse the release of water of the river.
“As we can not defy a constitutional body like the Supreme court, with a heavy heart we have chose to release the water as directed by the apex court”, states Siddaramaiah, Chief Minister, Karnataka.
Sources said the Supervisory Committee would visit both the riparian states to assess the “ground realities” and can adjust the current release of water against future releases.
Pro-Kannada organisations and farmer unions have called for Karnataka bandh on Friday, September 9, to raise their voice against the recent directive by Supreme Court pertaining to the release of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu. We have to succeed.
It said the live storage in four reservoirs in the Cauvery basin is now at 46.7 TMCFT against their capacity of 104 TMCFT making the implementation hard but “constitutionally, it is not possible to defy it (the Supreme Court’s order)”. “We can not say no to it”, the sources said.
As per the tribunal’s final award, the state has to release 192tmcft of water to Tamil Nadu during a normal year, when the Southwest Monsoon rainfall is above normal.
Unfortunately, the court directed the State to release water at 15,000 cusecs for 10 days, he said. “We are ready to go to jail and also face contempt of court case”, he stated.
“In 2012-13, when Jagadish Shettar was the CM, the state had released water up to 10,000 cusecs as a good will gesture”.
According to the sources, the state doesn’t have to release 15,000 cusecs as such, pointing out that 5,000 to 6,000 cusecs flows downstream to Tamil Nadu naturally.
The union Water Resources Secretary is the Chairman of the Supervisory Committee while the chief secretaries of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry are its members, besides officials from the Central Water Commission.
He said that all efforts would be made to provide drinking water to Bengaluru and other places of the state, along with supply water for crops in the state.
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Facing increasingly angry protests over his decision to release Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has moved swiftly to firefight the negative sentiment spreading against his government and is likely to release water for the farmers of the Mandya region as soon as Thursday.
