Buoyed by a good spell of rain over the last three days and rising inflows into the Prakasam Barrage, the Irrigation Advisory Board has resolved to release water into the canals of Krishna Western Delta on July 16, Guntur Channel on July 28 and Nagarjuna Sagar Project Jawahar (Right) Canal on August 25. District Collector V.N. Vishnu chaired the IAB meeting on Tuesday.
Earlier, the Collector expressed his concern over the alarming levels in the drinking water tanks in many mandals in the district. Out of 94 water tanks under the KWD, 21 had zero per cent storage capacity, while 40 tanks have a storage capacity of about 25 per cent. The Collector instructed the SE, Rural Water Supply, to take measures to transport water through tankers in the habitations facing acute drinking water shortage.
Joint teams from revenue, irrigation and RWS would inspect the village tanks and suggest measures to tide over the crisis.
Presenting a picture of hope for the ensuing kharif season, Mr. Vishnu said that that the district had received an excess rainfall of 28 per cent in June this year when compared to the normal rainfall of 86.3 mm.
Kharif operations had begun in 1.60 lakh hectares out of 2.26 lakh hectares under the KWD ayacut and 7,600 lakh hectares out of 1.2 lakh hectares under the ayacut in NSP Canal command area.
Agriculture Joint Director A. Sridhar said that farmers in some mandals near Tadikonda successfully experimented with direct seeding method which could save on manpower cost.
The department supplied BPT 52.04 variety paddy seed.
NSP Canals Project Committee Chairman Gudipudi Narasimha Rao earlier created a flutter by threatening to walk out after he complained to the Collector that neither he nor distributor committee chairman were being invited to the IAB meetings for the last three years. K.S. Lakshmana Rao, MLC, took the irrigation engineers to task for failing to keep their promise of impounding 4 TMC water in the Dr. K.L. Rao Sagar Project (Pulichintala).
Had the water been impounded in the reservoir, KWD delta travails would have been resolved, he reasoned.
Modernisation works
Kandru Kamala, MLA, Mangalagiri, complained that details of modernisation works of Kondaveedu drain had not been included in the agenda, while T.G.V. Krishna Reddy too alleged that the Irrigation Department had been dilly dallying over the decision to finalise the tenders of KWD drain modernisation works.
MLAs D. Narendra Kumar (Ponnur), Nakka Anand Babu (Vemuru), Y. Venkateswara Reddy (Sattenapalli), Kandru Kamala (Mangalagiri) and MLCs Rayapati Srinivas, T.G.V. Krishna Reddy, and K.S. Lakshmana Rao were present.
