Editorial 1: Drawing lines in Cauvery waters
Recent Context:
- Recently, The Cauvery dispute has flared up again, the first time after 2018 when the Supreme Court (SC) re-adjudicated the dispute after a tribunal gave its award.
- The Court also directed the creation of the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) to implement the decision
About the recent issue and its impact:
- The current round of contestation began when Tamil Nadu approached the apex court in August, seeking directions to Karnataka to release Cauvery waters at the rate of 24,000 cusecs towards its due share.
- Karnataka contested it stating unfavourable rainfall. Eventually, the directions to Karnataka last week, asking it to begin release at the rate of 3,000 cusecs, led to widespread protests in the state.
- The Bengaluru Bandh on September 26, and the statewide bandh on September 29 led to the arrest of hundreds of persons, several cancelled flights and a halted economy.
Reasons for Inter-state river dispute
Loss of states due to river water dispute
- Though the dispute spans a couple of centuries, it has had frequent flare-ups since the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal (CWDT) began adjudicating in 1990. There have been several incidents of escalation, invariably during distress years.
- It often leads to civic unrest and violence, in addition to causing significant economic losses.
- According to the ASSOCHAM, the previous flare-up in 2016 had caused a loss of Rs 25,000 crore to Karnataka alone. The 2016 episode had also turned into an unseemly national spectacle with the two states haggling almost every day for the release of Cauvery waters.
Mechanism for resolution of interstate water disputes:
- Article 262 enables Parliament to provide for adjudication of dispute with respect to use, distribution or control of waters of inter-State River or river valley.
- Under Inter-State River Water Disputes Act (ISWD), 1956 provides for setting up of tribunals for adjudication of an inter-state river dispute.
- Inter-State River Water Disputes (Amendment) Bill, 2019 was introduced to amend ISWD Act.
CWDT and its role in Cauvery river water sharing
- The CWMA, assisted by its technical arm, the Cauvery Water Regulatory Committee (CWRC), has been coordinating the implementation of the Cauvery decision. This year’s distress conditions are putting this mechanism to the test.
- Given the sequence of events so far, observers agree that the CWMA made a perceptible difference. The existence of a formal interstate coordination mechanism helped in reducing the scale and intensity of escalation.
- While political equations and configurations matter, the CWMA as a dedicated institutional avenue for objective exchange and deliberation appears to have made an impact.
Way forward:
- It is an opportunity to recognise the critical importance of interstate institutional mechanisms in river-water disputes and reflect on how to sort them out. There are at least two reasons for this.
- One, episodes of escalation bust the myth of a permanent resolution of interstate river water disputes.
- The emerging understanding is that the binaries of conflict and cooperation are no longer valid.
- In a transboundary water-sharing context, conflict and cooperation coexist. We must supplement legal adjudication with institutional responses that sustain cooperation and mitigate conflict.
- Two, we need to reflect on how institutions like the CWMA can be improved, depending on the way this episode pans out.
- We have models like the NCA that evolved out of consensus and the CWMA that was created on Supreme Court directives. A renewed emphasis on consensus building may be needed.
Conclusion:
- This episode of escalation proves the contrary and may even lead to an embarrassing debunking of the whole rationale. This is a moment of reckoning not only for the Court but also for the amendment to the Interstates River Water Disputes Act which is under Parliament’s consideration.
Editorial 2: Caged parrots & Universities
Recent Context:
- Recently, heated debate on academic freedom in India’s universities has been observed. The debate itself is timely though, as we have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the university sector, to be understood as including all institutions of higher learning and research.
Whether academic freedom is so necessary to India’s universities?
- Data from UNESCO show India to be the country in which public spending per student in higher education in relation to that in primary schools is the highest.
- Academic freedom is, at times, confused with free speech when actually the issues at stake can be different.
- Arguably, there should be reasonable restrictions on free speech, excluding from its ambit hate, violation of privacy, defamation, spreading misinformation and threats to national security.
- As the question of academic freedom arises in the context of the pursuit of knowledge, it would be difficult to argue for any kind of restriction being placed on it.
- Hate speech, spreading lies and jeopardising national security cannot be construed as the pursuit of knowledge.
- Of course, grey areas do have a habit of intruding upon us unexpectedly but this does not weaken the commitment to the principle of academic freedom.
The recent debate on academic freedom
- The recent debate on academic freedom in India has focused exclusively on its status in the newly established private universities, many of which identify themselves as universities for the “liberal arts”, understood as subjects other than medicine, engineering, law and accountancy, also termed “the professions”.
- But can be liberal arts engaged in without academic freedom?.
- The university is to be understood as an entity devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, and freedom is central to this exercise, whatever the body of knowledge or “discipline”.
- However, there are instances we may think of the response to the ideas propounded by the astronomer Galileo Galilei or of the biologist Charles Darwin. Both faced strong opposition from religious forces in their societies, the former quite menacingly, shows the significance of freedom not only academic perspective but also in society.
The inconvenient truth is that universities without academic freedom need not fail.
- There are areas of an economy where critical thinking may not be so central to performance as an understanding of the technology once operations have been routinised and protocols exist for all actions.
- Now, only commercial considerations are relevant. Think of the function of managing other people’s money by investing in the stock market.
- Here, the task is not to uncover the functioning of the world, often not even of the economy, but to merely figure out the stock that is likely to be the most attractive to the other punters.
- When engaged in the task of producing a work force for deployment in routine tasks in the economy, universities are unlikely to encounter too many issues related to academic freedom.
- In fact, as the professions make up a large part of the economy, universities can coast along without so much as giving a thought to it. Their continuity is assured. But we also create universities to imagine our common future.
Conclusion:
- Unless they are convinced that the present is the best of all possible worlds, academics must engage in the task of envisioning a better future.
- If by academic freedom we mean the unfettered pursuit of knowledge, a society must ensure that the universities are guaranteed it. One can think of universities as having been set up by society to hold up a mirror to it.
- And to set them up at public expense and turn them into caged parrots would count as a perverse logic.