To douse growing anger, K'taka will release Cauvery water for its farmers

Bengaluru: Facing increasingly angry protests over his decision to release Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has moved swiftly to firefight the negative sentiment spreading against his government and is likely to release water for the farmers of the Mandya region as soon as Thursday.

Mandya had become the epicentre of protests against the release of Cauvery water to TN and life in the district had come to grinding halt with commercial establishments and educational institutions closing down due to demonstrations.

In adherence to the Supreme Court order, Karnataka had, from Tuesday night begun releasing 15,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu, as against its own generous offer to release 10,000 cusecs a day.

Laying out the case that his government had little choice, but to comply with the SC ruling, CM Sidddaramaiah tellingly, revealed to journalists at a specially convened breakfast meeting that despite the state being in distress, he had followed the SC order to a T.

"For drinking water, we need 28.08 tmc of water and for agriculture, we need 47.71 tmc. And for filling the tanks, we need 11.58 tmc. We have only 58.78 tmc of water in all our four reservoirs, but we have complied," he said.

Siddaramaiah defended the government's decision to release water to Tamil Nadu. "It is inevitable to comply with the Supreme Court order. Failing which we would face contempt of court case and we do not want to get into such situation. Therefore, we decided to release water," he said.

However, signaling what the CM will do next, the Principal Secretary, water resources department, Rakesh Singh had told Deccan Chronicle that the authority would resume release of water for standing crops in Karnataka as soon as possible.

Singh said that Karnataka requested the Cauvery Supervisory Committee headed by the Union water secretary to assess the ground-level situation, indicating he was pinning his hopes on the north-east monsoon kicking in within the next 15 days to a month, boosting the groundwater level, which the fact-finding mission could use to ensure a more equitable arrangement was put in place.

"In 2012, a technical team visited the Cauvery reservoirs and we think this time around, a similar exercise might happen. However, so far, we have not received any communication as yet," he said.