Chandigarh, Jan 24 (PTI) Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and his Haryana counterpart Nayab Singh Saini will discuss the long-pending Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal (SYL) issue here on January 27, sources
said on Saturday.
Senior officers of both governments are also expected to be part of the meeting.
Notably, the SYL canal issue has been a bone of contention between the two states for the past several years. Last May, the Supreme Court directed the two states to cooperate with the Centre for an amicable solution to the decades-old dispute over the canal.
The SYL canal was conceptualised for the effective sharing of water between the two states from the Ravi and Beas rivers. The project envisages a 214-kilometre canal, of which 122 km was to be constructed in Punjab and the remaining 92 km in Haryana.
Haryana has completed the project in its territory, but Punjab, which launched the work in 1982, shelved it.
With the dispute lingering on for decades, the top court on January 15, 2002, ruled in favour of Haryana in a suit filed by the state in 1996 and directed the Punjab government to construct its portion of the SYL canal.
The Punjab government has been maintaining that the state has no surplus water for others and demanding its legitimate share of the Indus waters. On the other hand, the Haryana government has been demanding its share of river waters, which, it asserted, has not been getting due to the non-construction of the SYL canal.
After the SC directions, Union Minister of Jal Shakti Shri C R Patil had convened a meeting of Mann and Saini on July 9 in Delhi to address the long-standing issue. Thereafter, another meeting of both the chief ministers was convened by the Union minister on August 5 last year.
In one of the meetings, Mann had urged the Centre to utilise the waters of the Chenab River to resolve the water-sharing dispute between his state and Haryana, and sought the scrapping of the SYL canal project.
He had also mooted the idea of a Yamuna Sutlej Link (YSL) canal instead of the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal, saying the Sutlej river has already dried up and there was no question of sharing even a single drop of water from it.
Rather, water from the Ganga and Yamuna should be supplied to Punjab through the Sutlej, he had said while Mann highlighting that the SYL canal was an “emotive issue”. PTI CHS SUN NSD NSD
