With flood receding in the Krishna River and with the Almatti, Narayanapur and Tungabhadra dams in Karnataka registering reduced inflows, AP, which has to bear the brunt, is feeling the pressure. The state government is now planning to move the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal as well as the Supreme Court against permission given to Karnataka to further raise the Almatti dam height to 524m from 519.6m. Their plea is that there may be no water available downstream for AP once it starts filling up. The Brijesh Kumar Tribunal verdict has not been implemented so far, since the final pronouncement is pending, with arguments continuing on the December 2010 verdict.
As per the Bachawat Tribunal verdict that is currently in practice, Karnata-ka has been allowed to raise the Almatti dam height up to 519.6m, with 119.7 TMC ft capacity and total use not exceeding 173 TMC ft. Justice Brijesh Kumar Tribunal permitted Almatti’s height to go up to 524m, with 220 TMC ft capacity and total use up to 303 TMC ft. “According to our experience this year, when the Almatti dam height was at 519.6m, we were barely getting our normal share of water. If it’s raised to 524m, we won’t get a single drop of water. The situation will get worse in the coming years,” the engineer-in-chief, Mr Muralidhar, said.
In a normal year, Srisailam, the principle distributor of Krishna waters to various projects in the state, would have got between 500 to 650 TMC ft of water by September end, just sufficient to meet water requirements both under Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dams. The worst year was in 2002, when Srisailam got only 120 TMC ft in the entire season. Mr Muralidhar said Karnataka, without caring for natural justice and sharing both surplus and deficit, is only interested in filling its dams to full capacity and diverting additional inflow into canals. It does not bother to release water to downstream AP projects. “If Karnataka continues this trend, with the increased dam height, we won’t see inflows into Srisailam in the coming years,” he said.