Bihar and Jharkhand Sign Pact to Resolve 25-Year Sone River Water Sharing Dispute

Gist Bihar and Jharkhand have officially resolved a 25-year-old inter-state water dispute by signing a Memorandum of Understanding MoU to share the waters of the Sone river. Under the agreement, Bihar will receive 5.75 Million Acre-Feet MAF and Jharkhand will receive 2 MAF out of the basin yield originally allocated to undivided Bihar. For UPSC aspirants, this is a prime example of successful cooperative federalism resolving lower-versus-upper riparian conflicts, paving the way for long-delayed irrigation and river-linking projects in the drought-prone regions of both states. Background The Sone river flows northward from its upper catchments in Madhya Pradesh, passes through Uttar Pradesh, runs along the Bihar-Jharkhand boundary, and finally joins the Ganga river in Bihar. The root of the dispute lies in the 1973 Bansagar Agreement , a tripartite pact between Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and undivided Bihar, which allocated 7.75 MAF of Sone water to Bihar out of the total basin yield. When Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in November 2000 , the new state inherited the upper catchment areas and tributaries, while the lower riparian agricultural hubs…