Venkataramiah Commission award on Chandigarh, June 1986

Who: Justice E.S. Venkataramiah; the Chief Ministers of Punjab and Haryana, whom he asked to meet him on 9 June 1986; and the Government of India, which was to pay for Haryana's new capital.

What: Clause 7 of the Rajiv-Longowal Accord of 24 July 1985 said that a commission would decide which Hindi-speaking areas of Punjab should go to Haryana in lieu of Chandigarh, and that the city would pass to Punjab on 26 January 1986. The Tribune says Rajiv Gandhi "backed out at the eleventh hour" after a Haryana demonstration led by Devi Lal, and that the Mathew Commission had found 83 Hindi-speaking villages but ruled them out for want of contiguity.

Justice Venkataramiah's award, which came after that meeting of 9 June 1986 and is extracted in Gurmit Singh's book, took four questions: how much land should pass from Punjab to Haryana in lieu of Chandigarh, how many villages, how much help Haryana should get to build a capital, and what else to direct. The 105 villages and two towns of Fazilka and Abohar that "the former Prime Minister had agreed to transfer" were put at 3.59 lakh acres, about three lakh on an 83-village count; Haryana claimed 483 villages, about 4.5 lakh acres. He held that Haryana should receive administrative control over at least 70,000 acres, about one quarter of the Fazilka and Abohar area, noting that this was power to govern and not ownership of private land. He could not name the villages: Punjab rejects the 1961 census and Haryana the 1981, and the Chief Ministers could not agree on 9 June, so he recommended another commission and asked not to be given the work again. The Government of India was to bear the cost of land and buildings for Haryana's capital, and could recover any excess over Rs 200 crore by selling plots; the Rs 10 crore loan fixed in 1970 was "unrealistic and wholly inadequate".

Where: Chandigarh, and the Fazilka and Abohar area of Punjab.

Why it mattered: The Tribune wrote in 2010 that the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab stayed unresolved after three successive commissions, Mathew, Venkataramiah and Desai, failed to yield an agreement; in 2024 it added that the Punjab Government rejected the Desai Commission outright.