The creation of Haryana from the old Punjab in (1966) hurled the issue of giving Haryana its share of waterway waters. Punjab was against to share waters of the Ravi & Beas with Haryana, referring to riparian standards, and contending that it had no water to save. At a between state meeting met by the focal government in 1955, the aggregate computed stream (read water) of the Ravi and Beas — 15.85 million section of land feet (MAF) — had been separated among Rajasthan (8 MAF), unified Punjab (7.20 MAF) and Jammu and Kashmir (0.65 MAF). In March 1976, 10 years after the Punjab Reorganization Act was executed, and even as Punjab kept on challenging, the Center issued a warning dispensing to Haryana 3.5 MAF out of unified Punjab’s 7.2 MAF.

To enable Haryana to use its share of the waters of the Sutlej and its tributary Beas, a canal connecting the Sutlej with the Yamuna, cutting over the state, was arranged. On April 8, 1982, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi formally burrowed the ground at Kapoori town in Patiala area for the development of the 214-km Sutlej-Yamuna Link (or SYL) channel, 122 km of which was to be in Punjab, and 92 km in Haryana. A year prior, Indira Gandhi had arranged a tripartite agreement between Punjab (where Darbara Singh of the Congress was Chief Minister), Haryana (where Bhajan Lal, who had defected to the Congress from the Janata Party with numbers MLAs, was CM), and Rajasthan (where again the Congress was in power, with Shiv Charan Mathur as CM).