Chief Ministers of both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have agreed to set up joint teams of engineers, both serving and retired, from the two States to go round and select suitable locations to lift Godavari water to Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam projects and decide on tentative alignments.
The emphasis will be on the most economical and feasible options to execute the work in the time frame of next two to three years, said official sources.
The engineers-in-chief of both the States who met on Friday also met on Saturday and the joint teams were being set up. In the meantime, Andhra Pradesh’s Special Chief Secretary Irrigation Adityanath Das had a meeting with Telangana Chief Secretary S.K.Joshi on Saturday.
Field visit
It was decided that the ENCs will be given the task to form the teams and these teams will immediately go into the field and in the next one week they will come up with a tentative report. The irrigation secretaries of both the States will discuss it and present the report to both the chief ministers by July 15.
Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have set up parameters for lifting of Godavari waters — to satisfy the needs of North Coastal Andhra, Krishna and Godavari deltas and meet the demand on Nagarjuna Sagar Project of both the Right and Left canals.
Once these demands were met, then the demands of Rayalaseema districts of Andhra Pradesh and Mahabubnagar and part of Nalgonda of Telangana will be taken care of by the transfer of Godavari water to Srisailam reservior.
Separate teams
Sources also said that there would be separate teams to assess the demand for water and a smaller team would go and do the site selection and both the ENCs would come together and frame a report. Different teams have been given different tasks to save time and cut short unnecessary deliberations. “It is almost 200 km to 300 km of terrain drive and 150 meters of lift required to transfer Godavari waters, as Godavari is at a lower contour than Krishna, and take them to two reservoirs — NSP and Srisailam.”
Krishna projects have deficit of 300 tmcft a year even at the dependable source out of 811 tmcft. There is hardly any surplus water for projects built on Krishna water both in Telangana and Andhra. So, Godavari water has to supplement the reservoirs on Krishna. The initial exercise is more of an exploratory exercise to assess the feasibility and economic viability, say sources.
The Polavaram Project of Andhra Pradesh would at the most ensure that the deltas would not suffer beside giving water to north Andhra. “Any water in the upper stem of Godavari if Telangana is willing to allow it to come to Srisailam and NSP can be used for Rayalaseema and Mahabubnagar and part of Nalgonda if the costs are not prohibitive” sources said.
