Row over water going waste from SRSP

HYDERABAD: Release of water from Sri Ram Sagar Project (SRSP) in Nizamabad district, downstream of Godavari river, has triggered a controversy with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and information technology minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah questioning the decision of the authorities in allowing the water to go waste without filling the Lower Maniar Dam (LMD) in Karimnagar district.The LMD serves as a lifeline to major parts of Telangana.There have been heavy inflows into SRSP, following rains in the Godavari catchment area.The inflows were of the order of 1.5 lakh cusecs filling up the SRSP and necessitating authorities to lift 21 of the 42 gates to let the flood waters go down the river.Water is also being released to four canals which take off from the project - Flood Flow, Kakatiya, Lakshmi and Saraswati canals.As against its total capacity of 91 tmc ft, the present storage is 88 tmc ft.As LMD is almost empty, Karimnagar TRS leader B Vinod has questioned irrigation authorities on why they had not filled up the LMD, though there were huge inflows for the last few days.Lakshmaiah, who was angry for not letting the LMD fill, which feeds eight lakh acres in Karimnagar, Warangal and Nalgonda.He lodged a protest with chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy that though he had told the authorities on August 3 to fill LMD with flood flow channel, his direction was ignored and wanted the chief minister to ensure that such incidents would not recur in future.But, the authorities say that they did not release water into Kakatiya Canal because they were not sure whether the flood waters would continue for many days.“We have to first let the reservoir fill and then release water.How would we know that flood water would continue to flow into the SRSP, even after it fills up?” asked an irrigation department engineer.The authorities are letting out water at the rate of 1 lakh cusecs downstream of the river.The water flow in the four canals are: Flood Flow canal: 15,000 cusecs, Kaktiya: 8,000 cusecs, Lakhsmi: 300 cusecs and Saraswati: 500 cusecs.The main canal that feeds LMD is Kakatiya and the authorities were letting out water into the canal more than its capacity for filling LMD.They are also allowing water to flow through another canal connecting the Flood Flow canal to LMD.“What more can we do?” asked an engineer.The LMD has only 8.481 tmc ft as against its full capacity of 24.074 tmc ft.