Abstract
For hundreds of years, conflicts in water sharing have existed all around the globe. Cauvery River, in the southern part of India, has been in the midst of such conflict for the last 130 years. Historically, the conflict has been about the right to use water and the states/provinces in conflict have used the water from the river for agricultural purposes. Due to industrialization in the late 1980s and increasing population, water availability in the region has become stressed. Climate change has exacerbated the region’s water availability issues. Faltering rainfall has caused unrest in the region, and the traditional methods of water sharing are dwindling under political pressure. Without a climate change strategy, the governments of these states will never be able to solve this complex issue at hand. The Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) is applied to understand the nuances of this conflict. It models the preferences of the decision-makers (the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka) and the common option (goal) they can reach to potentially solve the conflict. Fuzzy preferences along with option prioritization is also applied to this conflict in order to account for the uncertainties in the decision-makers’ preferences. The purpose of this paper is to nudge decision-makers in a productive direction to overcome the long-impending political standoff, while introducing a new methodology of looking into this old conflict.
Highlights
There are several cases of river basins being shared by two or more countries
Fuzzy preference optimization can help streamline the available solutions by introducing cardinal values, which define a certain threshold to isolate the most preferred solutions
This study is aimed at providing a fresh look into the Cauvery conflict by applying the methodology of Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) along with fuzzy preferences
Summary
There are several cases of river basins being shared by two or more countries. Some of these nations have had troubles, like India and Pakistan over the Indus River; Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia over the Nile; and Israel, Palestine, and Syria over the Jordan River [1]. The “Right to Watercourse” [2] has been an issue of discontent among neighboring countries. Examples of points of contention include: Which country shall use what percentage of the water? Does the country of origin of the river have the complete right to the upstream water? There has never been an easy or rule-of-thumb solution for these kinds of issues and arguments because every river basin is unique. In 1997, the UN introduced the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses [3]
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