An eternal wait for water for farmers in these tail-end areas

The State government’s decision to not release water for paddy and other water-intensive crops in the Cauvery and Tungabhadra basins may have angered farmers in the irrigated belt. But the problem of farmers in the tail-end areas of the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal (TLBC) is an old one that has gone without redress.

Every year, very little water flows down to several parts of Raichur district, which are supposed to be irrigated by the TLBC. Of around 4 lakh acres in Sindhanur, Sirwar and Yermarus canal divisions of the Tungabhadra project that fall at the lower reaches of TLBC, only half has seen sowing of chilli, cotton and other crops and transplantation of paddy. The rest have been waiting for water.

When this correspondent visited the 104th-mile-point of TLBC near Sirwar, the water-flow level was hovering around just 1.2 ft against its targeted gauge of 6 ft. The logbook maintained at the nearby outpost revealed that the water level at the point in question was zero ft till midweek, which had gone up slightly following release of large quantities of water from the dam.

“If a gauge six-ft is maintained for at least 15 days, then only paddy transplantation can be completed in all empty fields. The present gauge of 1.2 ft is nothing considering the vast tracts of lands waiting for transplantation,” Chamarasa Malipatil, State president of Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, said.

Farmers and their leaders, elected representatives and even officials at the Department of Water Resources unanimously attributed water crisis at the canal’s lower reaches to illegal expansion of irrigation at the upper reaches. But, nobody exactly knows the extent of illegal expansion. For, no survey has been conducted even though the water crisis and resultant farmers’ agitations have been yearly phenomena for the last several years.

“Around 1.75 lakh acres of unauthorised lands in upper reaches of TLBC, most of which are in Gangavathi taluk in Koppal district, are illegally irrigated using around 600 cusecs of Tungabhadra water. As a result, over 2 lakh acres of authorised lands in lower reaches of the canal in Manvi, Raichur, and parts of Sindhanur taluks in Raichur district are deprived of their legitimate share of water,” D. Veerana Gowda, a leader of Karnataka Prantha Raitha Sangha, said.