Telangana to protest Karnataka's Tungabhadra river dam proposal in Delhi

Hyderabad: The Telangana government has decided to complaint to the Centre about Karnataka’s decision to build the Tungabhadra dam. “We will lodge a complaint with the Central government as well as the Krishna River Management Board constituted recently by the Central government,” said Telangana irrigation minister T Harish Rao.

The minister held discussions with engineering officials and ordered them to file a complaint immediately with the Centre. “We cannot keep quiet if the upper riparian state does whatever it want with a jointly operated project.

Anyways, we are yet to hear the proposal from Karnataka, we only saw the news reports on the minister’s announcement. We will raise the issue in the Tungabhadra Dam Board meeting which is scheduled for November 29,” said B. Adityanadh Das, principal secretary irrigation government of Andhra Pradesh.

“This is not an ordinary issue, we were not getting sufficient quota flows from the Tungabhadra Dam to our canals all these years, if they want to construct another dam upstream of Hospet Dam, the water will first fill up the new dam and only then reach the Tungabhadra Old Dam.

This means normal inflows into Srisailam Dam will be affected. It will have a cascading effect on all the irrigation systems in both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, which are highly dependent on the Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dams,” said C Muralidhar, engineering-in-chief, Government of Telangana.