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Amit Shah counted 10 water disputes. Why is Punjab’s Yamuna claim not one of them?

The Kishau dam agreement settles an eight-year deadlock among six states. But it also highlights Punjab’s absence from a Yamuna framework rooted in the 1994 pact.

As the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi signed the Kishau Multipurpose Dam Project agreement in New Delhi on Tuesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah rightly took credit for what he called the tenth inter-state water dispute resolved since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. 

Kishau, a dam on the Tons, a tributary of the Yamuna, had been stuck for more than eight years over cost-sharing. Amit Shah’s list included Lakhwar, Renukaji, Ken-Betwa and Shahpur Kandi, where Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir settled their Ravi quarrel in 2018. He added that 2018 to 2026 would be remembered as the years in which almost every water dispute from Kashmir to Uttar Pradesh was put to rest.

Ten counted, one never listed

I am not writing here about the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal or the Ravi-Beas waters, which remain unresolved and which I have dealt with elsewhere. I am writing about a dispute that appears in nobody’s count because it has never been allowed to become one: Punjab’s standing in the Yamuna basin.

It sits quietly on the back burner. Chandigarh brings it out now and then as a debating retort; Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann told the Northern Zonal Council in 2023 that Punjab’s request for Yamuna water had been turned down because no part of the state lies in the basin, and proposed a........

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