Chandigarh: Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann on Thursday said that Punjab did not have a single drop of water to share with anyone.
Mann said this after chairing an emergency Cabinet meeting at his residence; he said in a post on X that the issue of SYL was discussed in the meeting in which it was decided that not even a single drop of additional water would be given to any other state at any cost.
The Cabinet opined that the state had no spare water to share with any other state so there was no question of construction of Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal. It firmly said that Sutlej river had already dried up and Punjab had no surplus water to share with Haryana and reassessment of availability of water was required as per international norms. It was also observed that Punjab’s 76.5% blocks (117 out of 153) are over-exploited where the stage of ground water extraction was more than 100%, whereas in Haryana only 61.5% (88 out of 143) are over-exploited.
Pertinently, Mann's assertion came a day after the SC had asked the BJP-led Centre to survey the portion of land in Punjab that was allocated for the construction of a part of the Sutlej-Yamuna-Link (SYL) canal.
Notably, there was no formal agenda for the Cabinet meeting but it was called to discuss the SYL issue and the approval to the appointment of Gurminder Singh as the new advocate general (AG) of Punjab.
Mann said that the Cabinet also planned to convene the monsoon session soon.
The said development was also seen as the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government’s counter attack to the Opposition Congress and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) parties which had assailed the Mann-led AAP government for not defending Punjab’s case properly in the Supreme Court.
Demand for a tribunal
Earlier, the AAP chief spokesperson Malvinder Singh Kang had demanded that a tribunal be constituted to know the current availability of water in SYL canal in Punjab. He said that the land which was notified for SYL canal had been denotified and notifying it again would create many problems.
He said that the water situation in Punjab was no longer the same as it was 50 years ago as it itself was struggling with water issues today.
Therefore it was not possible to make SYL canal because the state neither had extra water nor the required land, he said, adding that Punjab would again move the court and raise these issues before the Central government.
For the record, out of the total 5,376 acre of land acquired for the construction of the SYL canal, ownership rights of about 4,627 acres was denotified in 2016; the remaining land ha minors and distributaries from the main canal to irrigate farm lands in Ropar, Fatehgarh Sahib, Mohali and Patiala districts.
