Hyderabad: TS Congress leaders will meet Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in Bengaluru on Friday to request him to release Krishna and Tungabhadra river waters to the state.
They may be hoping to get some political mileage, but the Karnataka irrigation authorities started releasing surplus water from the Narayanpur dam to the Jurala dam on Thursday afternoon.
Hitherto, Karnataka officials after filling up both the Almatti and Narayan-pur dams were diverting additional inflows to canals under the Narayan-pur command area, starving downstream Jurala.
Due to fresh inflows of 35,000 cusecs into the Almatti dam on Thursday morning, officials relea-sed the same quantum of water to Narayanapur dam, which has also reached its full level.
Since there is no further scope to divert the waters, officials at the Narayan-pur dam released 21,000 cusecs of water in the afternoon, which will take 24 hours to reach Jurala.
Though the TS government had sought the Karnataka government’s intervention to release 15 tmc ft of water to tide over the drinking water scarcity in Nalgonda and Hyderabad in early August, and even deputed a chief engineer to meet officials, Karnataka refused to release water citing lack of political decision at higher levels.
Now, whatever inflows TS will get is not due to any generosity of the Karnataka government, but because there is nowhere else to divert the water in Karnataka.
Despite this, TPCC president N. Uttam Kumar Reddy, Leaders of the Opposition K. Jana Reddy (Assembly), Shabbir Ali (Council), legislator D.K. Aruna and five others will meeting Mr Siddaramaiah on Friday in Bengaluru to seek Krishna waters.
“We don't know about the release of water. We sought an appointment some time back and got it now. We may ask the Karnataka CM to release some Tungabhadra water for the Rajolibanda Diver-sion Scheme for Gadwal district,” a senior leader said.
