There was a glimmer of hope that Sriramsagar project at Pochampad which is the lifeline for agriculture in Telangana will see a good season when it received good inflows initially but it is back to despair for the farmers in the ayacut as water has stopped coming from the catchment.
The project received 1,000 cusecs from June 16 to 18 owing to rains in the catchment in Maharashtra but it fell to 232 cusecs now. Yet, the storage in SRSP was far better than last year as on date. Against the full reservoir level of 1,091 ft, the level on Friday was 1,056.30 ft and storage 10.245 tmc. The storage capacity of the project is 90 tmc.
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The storage in SRSP was 7.297 tmc and level 1,052 ft on June 21 last year. It had an ayacut of five lakh acres for kharif and three lakh acres for rabi though the localised areas was 9.68 lakh acres.
The Chief Engineer of the project B. Shankar told The Hindu that water would be released into the canals only when the storage improved. It all depended on rains beyond Nanded and then filling up of eleven barrages of Babli project before water being finally let out into SRSP.
There was hope for improvement till August end. He also said 2.5 tmc of water was released from Lower Manair Dam, the balancing reservoir of the project in Karimnagar, for drinking water purposes in Warangal and Nalgonda last month. The water travelled over 325 kms in Kakatiya canal to fill all tanks en route.
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Comfortable position
In contrast to SRSP, the Kaddam project in Adilabad which was linked to SRSP by Saraswati canal over 47 kms was in a comfortable position. The level was 694.4 ft against the FRL of 700 ft. Its storage was 6.22 tmc against a capacity of 7.63 tmc. The project was filled up mainly due to rains in the catchment from June 16 to 18. This was the first time in several years that Kaddam project with an ayacut of 68,000 acres received so much of water in June.