The Supreme Court has emphatically stated that an inter-State river is a “national asset” and being in a state of flow, no State can claim exclusive ownership of its waters or assert a prescriptive right so as to deprive other States of their equitable share. Equitable distribution of inter-State river water, the court says, is a precious right that should be equally and reasonably shared by all concerned States. Chief Justice Dipak Misra, speaking for the court, further says, “While it is common and equal to all through whose land the river runs and no one can obstruct or divert it; yet, as one of the beneficial gifts of nature, each beneficiary has a right to just and reasonable use of it.” The Supreme Court reaffirms the principle of equitable apportionment to be intrinsically embedded generally in a pursuit for apportionment of water of an international drainage basin spreading over two or more States, predicates that every riparian State is entitled to a fair share of the water according to its need and is imbued with the philosophy that a river has been provided by nature for the common benefit of a community as a whole through whose territory it flows even though those territories may be divided by frontiers as postulated in law. In clarifying the matters further, the court goes on to say the “principle of equality” among the riparian States does not imply equal division of water. Equality, in this context, means “equal consideration and equal economic opportunity of the co-basin States”. The court further says, “To conceive that equality rests on equal sharing of water within an arithmetical formula would be fundamentally violative of the established conception of equitable apportionment.” In evaluating these, the court compared the sharing of inter-State river waters in India to the practices of sharing of international rivers among nations. Proportionality is an integral part of equitable distribution of the gift of nature.
