“It’s a farmer’s issue, not a politician’s. Karnataka’s attitude is totally to destroy us,” Mannargudi Ranganathan, who filed the first petition in the Supreme Court in 1983 for equitable distribution of Cauvery, told me some weeks ago. He added, “Cauvery is a deficit river. The requirement of all the riparian states—TN, Karnataka, Kerala and Puducherry—is 1250 thousand million cubic feet (tmc ft.), but what is available for distribution is 671 tmc ft.,” says Ranganath, who is also the general secretary of the Cauvery Delta Farmers Welfare Association.
N. Natarajan, author of two books on the Cauvery, told me, politics had always caused the two states to bicker. “One must remember farmers (there are 18.5 lakh hectares under cultivation in these districts) here cannot do anything, they can only ask Karnataka.” He points out that in these districts, people only depend on agriculture and already they are handicapped by shortage of power, lack of remunerative prices for their produce, paucity of labour because freebies have led to them refusing to work in fields, and the lack of any industry. “Once in three or four years there is a shortfall because of a bad monsoon and emotions run high.” Natarajan is a member of the Cauvery Family (set up by the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) in 2003), which includes 15 farmers from TN and Karnataka each apart from three from Puducherry. “We are very cordial to each other and understand each other’s problems. It’s the politicians who have not understood the real problem of the farmers.”
Political Acrobatics