Jalandhar: When Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann on Wednesday asked Rajasthan govt to pay Rs 1.44 lakh crore in dues for the state’s water it has used since 1960, it was not the first time that the natural resource was being quantified in monetary terms in the long-running water dispute.Late Pritam Singh Kumedan, Punjab’s foremost expert on river water issues who had also been an adviser to the Punjab govt on the matter, had in 2009 computed that while 10.6 million acre feet (MAF) of water flowed to Rajasthan, Punjab had incurred a cost of Rs 80,000 crore to extract the same amount of subsoil water to meet its irrigation needs. That year, he also wrote to the then CM Parkash Singh Badal, to raise the Rs 80,000-crore demand with Rajasthan.Kumedan, a former officer of the Punjab Civil Services (PCS), had educated bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, activists and even advocates on the finer constitutional and legal aspects of river water issues. In his letter dated Oct 17, 2009, to Badal, he stated that he had calculated the cost of electricity and diesel alone for extracting one crore acre-feet of groundwater annually for the last 40 years at Rs 80,000 crore, as Punjab was deprived of equivalent river water which it would have used without incurring any expenditure.He clarified this amount did not include any royalty or the cost of water, but only expenditure incurred by Punjab to make up for the loss it suffered after being deprived of a major chunk of Ravi and Beas waters.Speaking to TOI in Aug 2010, Kumedan, who passed away in Aug 2022, argued that Punjab required 50 MAF of water annually for irrigation, of which 25 MAF came from canals and rain, and the rest from tubewells. “Punjab could have utilised the 10 MAF for its own dire needs and would not have had to spend on power or diesel engines to draw subsoil water,” he said. “Annual recharge was only about 15 MAF and the underground water table was depleting fast, losing 10 MAF annually,” he added.Taking into consideration data from Punjab State Electricity Regulatory Commission on power consumption for irrigation, Kumedan concluded that Punjab was using 400 crore units of power worth Rs 2,000 crore to draw 10 MAF of subsoil water annually. On this basis, he estimated that Punjab spent Rs 80,000 crore on extracting groundwater.
