Bhubaneswar: Odisha government has urged the Centre to introduce specific policy decision for resolving inter-state river basin disputes in a time-bound and effective manner.
The State Water Resources (WR) Department has urged Union Ministry of Jal Shakti to incorporate specific provisions in its National Water Policy (NWP) to resolve inter-state water disputes.
The Centre has been evolving a policy to govern the planning and development of water resources and their optimum utilisation. It has formed a committee to draft the policy and sought suggestions and views from various states to finalise the draft.
In its suggestion, Odisha government has said, “The inter-state disputes among the co-basin states are based primarily on equitable and judicious distribution of water maintaining e-flows throughout the year along the river. The committee should safeguard and protect the water utilisation in framing judicious policies to address these matters in the inter-state rivers.”
Lower riparian states like Odisha is always prone to floods in monsoons and cyclones from the Bay of Bengal. Similarly, in summer, the state suffers due to unregulated construction of dams and barrages by the upper riparian states affecting the entitlement of the lower riparian state like Odisha, the WR department said.
“The National Water Policy should reflect these issues in addition to resolving inter-state river basin disputes in a time-bound and effective manner,” it said.
As Odisha frequently suffers due to cyclones, floods, tidal effects, saline ingress and landslides, the eco-sensitive habitats, river embankments, crops, houses, human and domestic life are severely affected causing great economical losses across the year.
In view of these issues, the state government has advised the Centre to address the issues with special reference to the coastal state for critical water management issues in the policy.
The water resources projects needs a number of statutory clearance parameters like environment, forest and R&R issues before its execution and the clearance of all issues take time at different levels. Therefore, the state WR department suggested setting up of a single-window clearance mechanism for public projects and development of the state in a scheduled time-frame.
The state also urged the Centre to encourage technological and scientific interventions to address issues of land acquisition and to reduce cost overrun of the project.
The NWP should advocate policy interventions to co-ordinate with all related departments for enhancing, execution, modernisation of projects for optimising water use efficiently, suggested the state government.
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