Mysuru/Chennai, 25 July

Farmers in Karnataka welcomed on Saturday the potential upcoming meeting on 3 August between Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay and Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar over water sharing disputes.

However, farmer associations and politicians in Tamil Nadu criticised the bilateral talks, especially in light of Karnataka’s push for the Mekedatu Balancing Reservoir on the Cauvery River.

Karnataka State Sugarcane Growers Association President Kurubur Shanthakumar argued in a press release that Vijay was demonstrating that inter-state water disputes can be resolved bilaterally and through the judicial mechanism.

“Reviving a dialogue between two states during distressed years is a right step to find an amicable, mutually respectable solution to the Cauvery water sharing dispute in the larger interest of the farming community,” he stated.

Shanthakumar claimed that an excess of 250 tmc ft of Cauvery water had flowed into the sea last year amid corpus rainfall because there wasn’t any sufficient storage mechanism. He said that Tamil Nadu should therefore allow Karnataka to construct the Mekedatu dam as it would benefit farmers in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

However, the Tamil Nadu Cauvery Farmers Association, led by PR Pandian argued that negotiations outside the statutory framework would bypass the legal mechanism established by the Supreme Court, and urged Vijay to press the Centre to secure the release of 27.5 TMC ft of water from Karnataka.

In its landmark 2018 judgment, the Supreme Court constituted the Cauvery Water Management Authority and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee as the statutory mechanisms to regulate and implement water-sharing between the two states. But between 1 June and 22 July, 2026, Tamil Nadu received only 3.5 TMC ft of water against the 31 TMC ft it was entitled to, amid the ongoing El Nino conditions.

Heads of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have had bilateral talks about the proposed Mekedatu dam from as far back as the 1970s, but Vijay’s predecessor MK Stalin said that there was no point holding such discussions.

He doubled down on this on Saturday, stating that “negotiation efforts will only serve to undermine the rights we have legally fought for over decades. It will lead to setbacks in the court”.

He said that the talks would be a “poisonous experiment” and urged Vijay to withdraw from the discussion.