The Telangana government has written an SOS letter to Karnataka requesting release of 15 TMC ft water from Almatti/Narayanpur reservoirs to meet the drinking water shortage for Hyderabad and fluoride-affected areas of Nalgonda district, which draw water from Nagarjunasagar Project (NSP).
Crisis situation
Official sources told The Hindu that the Telangana State Government communicated to Karnataka following a letter written by the Chief Engineer of Nagarjunasagar Project and another letter written by the authorities of the Hyderabad Metro Water Supply & Sewerage Board to the Government about depletion of water level below the minimum draw down level (MDDL) and the difficulty being faced in pumping water to Hyderabad.
Minister for Irrigation T. Harish Rao has explained in the letter addressed to his Karnataka counterpart M.B. Patil the difficulties in utilising Nagarjunasagar water as the water level in the reservoir stood at 500.50 feet on Monday against the MDDL of 510 ft. It slipped further to 500.40 ft on Tuesday morning with no inflows into the dam. “We would be barely able to sustain drinking water supply without any inflows,” the Minister said in his letter. Official sources stated that muddy water was reaching the filter beds due to depletion of water level at Puttamgandi intake point in Nagarjunasagar. “Seeking water release from Karnataka has become inevitable following stoppage of even meagre outflows into the river course from Narayanpur dam from 1 a.m. on Monday,” the officials said.
In May last year, Karnataka released 1 TMC ft water from Narayanpur to Jurala for drinking needs after a request was made by Telangana to release at least 3 TMC ft water. Flood monitoring officials stated that the chances of Jurala, the gateway for Krishna water into Telangana, getting any significant flood in the next few weeks is very slim since the inflows into Almatti stood barely 6,000 cusecs on Tuesday morning and continued release of water to irrigation canals of Almatti and Narayanpur reservoirs even as they have just 3 TMC ft short of their gross storage capacity.
Almatti has already received 153.4 TMC ft of flood this monsoon season and over 25 TMC ft has been utilised under it including the releases to Narayanpur and irrigation needs. Not even 1 TMC ft water has been released into the river from Narayanpur even as over 11.5 TMC ft has been utilised under it this season, Irrigation Department officials explained.
