The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it was “sheer contempt” of the court’s verdict that the Centre had not yet drafted a scheme on the sharing of Cauvery water between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, The Times of India reported. In February, the court had asked the Centre to set up a Cauvery Water Management Board by March 29, and later extended the deadline to May 3.
The court asked the secretary of the Union Water Resources Ministry to appear before it on May 14 with a draft scheme on the Cauvery water management board. “We do not want to come back to square one,” the court said. “Once judgement has been delivered, it has to be implemented.”
The Cauvery water sharing dispute has been going on for 22 years now. In February, the Supreme Court directed Karnataka to release 177.25 tmcft of Cauvery water per year to Tamil Nadu.
The Centre told the Supreme Court on May 3 that it had failed to meet the deadline for framing the draft of the Cauvery water-sharing scheme because Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the other ministers were busy with preparations for the May 12 Assembly elections in Karnataka. This earned the government a rebuke from the court.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Tamil Nadu’s counsel Shekhar Naphade took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying, “Someone boasts that he works 24x7 for the citizens.”
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