Hyderabad: Telangana says it has no other alternative but to use water in Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dams as it has to meet the power demand, especially to the agricultural sector in view of the huge gap between demand and supply.
Whatever the valid reasons from the two governments over release of water or not to release water, the water level at Sr-isailam dam has re-ached to 861 ft with only 112 TMC ft of water capacity on Saturday.
The entire Rayala-seema’s water needs including drinking water supplies to Chennai are tagged to releases from Srisailam dam through Pothireddypadu head regulator which cannot draw water from the dam if the level is below 854 ft.
The KRMB which is supposed to monitor all the releases from Krishna River based projects has not yet issued any st-rict guidelines for regulation of wat-ers.
The AP governme-nt on Saturday in-structed dam offici-als to stop power ge-neration from the ri-ght side Power Hou-se ( 770 MW) to save water from its side.
However, the Telangana government is continuing power generation from Left Bank Power House (900 MW) by releasing 4 TMC ft of wa-ter every day from the quota of waters allotted to it.
The released wat-ers are reaching do-wnstream Nagarjunasagar dam, where again the Telangana government is generating power (880 MW) and releasing waters to downst-ream Krishna delta system.
In fact, the operation schedules of da-ms clearly indicate that water should be released to power houses for the purpose of meeting irrigation demands otherwise it should not.
“We informed the KRMB about this, we may not require waters for Krishna delta needs as of now due to local rains, if the Telangana government goes on releasing waters from Nagarjunasagar dam we may have to allow it to go to the sea, which is not at all good. If water is depleted for the sake of power generation we cannot send a single drop into Pothireddypadu regulator. The elangana government should help us in impounding more water at Srisailam,” AP government principal secretary to irrigation Adityanath Das told this newspaper.
However, the Telangana government brushed aside the argument.
“Still there is a gap of over 20 MU in meeting power demand in Telangana, we cannot increase load relief measures further as we have been doing more already.”
“AP is not supplying our share of power from Krishnapatnam, lower Sileru and Simhadri NTPC unit. They don’t give us power yet they want to blame us. We did not get sufficient rains; agricultural demand is more here. Till the month end we are committed to supply to agriculture as all crops are in an advance stage,” said Telangana irrigation minister Mr Harish Rao.
