Saturday,
April 13, 2002, Chandigarh, India
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Need to resolve SYL issue through dialogue THIS has reference to your editorial
“In hot water again” (April 3). I fully support your view that “some solution will have to be worked out through dialogue by the parties concerned before the situation gets explosive.” Haryana should be wise enough to cover even the extra mile to reach some settlement because of two reasons. First, it is Haryana alone which is suffering on account of delay and second, because of its life-long handicap of being a lower shareholder of a water course, it is prudent not to have any confrontation with the upper one. Such a settlement should not be difficult to achieve because the people of both states come from the same ethnic stock, have a common history and culture and do not have any ideological conflict. Was not such a settlement over the distribution of river waters reached even between India and Pakistan despite their proverbial hostility towards each other? You are quite right in maintaining that a socio-economic issue like distribution of river water has been politicised. Had it not been so, misleading propaganda that the water which is to flow in Sutlez Yamuna Link (SYL) is that of the river Ravi over which Punjab has the so-called the riparian rights etc, would not have gained currency. The true picture is that at the time of partition of the Indus basin between India and Pakistan, under international law, the former had the right to withdraw water from the upper reaches of the rivers Sind, Jhelum and Chenab and the latter from the lower reaches of the river Ravi. In 1960, the two countries reached a settlement by which India agreed to forego its right of withdrawal from the rivers Sind, Jhelum and Chenab in exchange for its obligation to release Pakistan’s share of water in the Ravi. This created a surplus for India in the river Ravi which became the joint property of all the three Indian states in the Indus basin i.e. Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. By no stretch of imagination, can this water obtained by bartering, be called Ravi water. Where is the question of Punjab having some riparian right over it? By keeping mum over this explosive issue, our media has failed to do its duty of educating the public.
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