Hyderabad: The three-member committee on distributing the Krishna waters between Telangana and AP on Monday decided to reserve the existing storage at Nagarjun-asagar and Srisailam for the drinking water needs in both the states, and virtually declared a “crop holiday” for the areas served by irrigation projects on the river.
In a repeat of 2012-13, when the water situation was precarious, the committee decided to hold the “anticipated inflows” into Krishna projects in August, September and October as reserves for drinking water needs up to June next year.
The meeting was chaired by Mr R.K. Gupta, member secretary of the Krishna River Management Board, and was attended by engineering-in-chiefs C. Muralidhar and M. Venkateswara Rao of Telangana and AP.
The meeting decided to keep the minimum draw down level (MDDL) of Nagarjun-asagar Dam at 510 ft to ensure that Hyderabad’s drinking water needs are not affected. On Monday, water at the NS Dam stood at 510.70 ft.
It may be mentioned here that the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Board has already placed a request with the KRMB to keep the NS Dam level at 510 ft; otherwise they cannot lift the water to the capital city.
“It is a critical situation. We have to hope for good inflows at least in the coming three months,” Mr Muralidhar said.
He added that both the governments had agreed not to release available water for irrigation purposes despite some farmers raising crops on their own due to local rains.
The precarious situation has virtually sealed the chances of supplying water to the Chennai drinking water scheme from Srisailam. Without maintaining a level of 854 ft at the dam, water cannot be drawn for Chennai through the Telugu Ganga project.
Presently, water from the Tungabhadra dam is supplied to the Tungabhadra High Level Canal (Anantapur) and Low Level Canal (Kurnool) in AP, besides in Karnataka. Apart from this, there is no water available to any project in both Telangana and AP.
