Hyderabad: At the end of a four-hour meeting, the Telangana state convinced the Krishna River Management Board to allot it an additional 4 percentage point share in the main storage in the Krishna river.
The board had allotted 34 per cent, or about 112 tmc ft, to Telangana state, and 218 tmc ft to Andhra Pradesh of the 330 tmc ft of Krishna waters available at Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar.
The earlier allocation quota was 30:70. AP has insisted that the board include the Jurala project into the calculations so that it could also be shared between the two states. TS objected to it and said it would have no problem if Almatti, Tungabhadra and Narayanapur dams were also included.
Telangana state argued when Jurala is not a common project for TS and AP, it cannot be included. The AP government told the board that Telangana state in the name of minor irrigation was diverting water from the river to various tanks. This water needed to be quantified and accounted for.
Disagreeing with this contention, TS officials pointed out that the AP government was not sharing information with regard to its use of water for minor irrigation.
The TS government said that the telemetry system set up at Pothireddypadu head regulator was not operational and the AP government was diverting huge quantities of water to projects outside the Krishna basin. The board said that that was not the case, and even the manual operation chart was also valid at Pothireddypadu.
