The Brijesh Kumar tribunal’s award on utilisation of Krishna waters should be set aside in view of the “gross deviations and bias” and a fresh tribunal constituted and until then the Bachawat Award should be implemented.
It was the view of former Irrigation Chief Engineer S. Satyanarayana during a discussion on the recent award of the Brijesh Kumar tribunal organised by AP Ryot Sangham here on Friday.
Mr. Satyanarayana took exception to Brijesh Kumar ‘completely deviating from the established procedure to arrive at the dependable yield to obtain the river flows for 100 years and arrive at the yield based on 75 per cent dependability adopted by Bachawat tribunal. The Brijesh Kumar tribunal arrived at the dependable yield considering only 47 years of inflows and arrived at the dependable yield of 65 per cent.
The retired Irrigation official said Brijesh Kumar tribunal arrived at the surplus flow of 285 tmcft and distributed it among all the three states instead of the lower riparian State of Andhra Pradesh. Thus Maharashtra and Karnataka are eligible to construct more projects utilising water to an extent of 285 tmc ft while Andhra Pradesh is not even getting its share of water allotted by Bachawat tribunal with regular inflows, points out Mr. Satyanarayana.
He also objects to the calculation of flood water as utilised by Andhra Pradesh and says only regular flows should be taken into consideration.
Almatti height
Mr. Satyanarayana said after the construction of Almatti dam in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh was not receiving regular flows owing to excess utilisation and alleged blocking of regular flows. He feared that with the Brijesh Kumar tribunal conceding the Karnataka demand of further raising the height of the dam by 4.65 m and an additional capacity of 130 tmc, there would be total blockage of flow to Andhra Pradesh.
Alleging that jugglery of figures boosting the yield increased allocation to Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Satyanarayana said the so called 1001 tmcft would never reach Andhra Pradesh.
Ryot Sangham district president A. Balakrishna presided. CPI-M district secretary Ch. Narsinga Rao and sangham secretary K. Appa Rao participated.
