No water for irrigation in Karnataka: Expert

Bengaluru: As the government has been claiming that the state will not have a drinking water crisis next summer, water conservationist Vishwanath Srikantaiah points out that the government is caught in its own trap by not releasing water to Tamil Nadu earlier.

The expert, who agrees that even if there is no rain Bengaluru can still survive this summer, stresses that the government woke up late in taking a rational decision on releasing water to Tamil Nadu.

He explains, “Between September 23 and 27, as per government data, the storage in four reservoirs – Harangi, Hemavathy, Kabini and KRS was 30.53 tmcft and the live storage had increased by 2.59 tmcft, excluding dead storage. Based on the Supreme Court order, the state had to release only 1.555 tmcft of water. For that week, if the state had released the water, we would have 28.975 TMC and the state would have been in a better situation.”

He says that the government made a mistake in not taking additional water inflow into our reservoirs into account. “If it had calculated the additional 5,000 cusecs it expects in November, it wouldn’t have had to go against the Supreme Court,” he maintains.

He explains that even without opening any of the reservoir gates, the state could have taken credit for releasing water to Tamil Nadu as water naturally flows from Biligundlu to Tamil Nadu.

Over 33 tmcft water till June
Commenting about the Supreme Court’s latest order on releasing 6,000 cusecs water between October 1 and 6, Mr Vishwanath says, “There should be no water shortage as the state will release 1.55 tmcft of water and with an additional inflow into our reservoirs, we will have 33.12 tmcft of water as on October 7.”

He says, “Drinking water demand for Bengaluru till June is 13.5 tmcft. Assuming that the water demand for Mysuru, Mandya, Ramanagaram and other places is 6.5 tmcft, the total drinking water demand would be 20 tmcft, which the government will have. However, there may not be enough water for irrigation and there has always been a water crisis for irrigation. The government must have had a Plan B by June 1 this year. Instead, it woke to the problems only in September,” he explains.

He asserts that the government may have to do demand management, but certainly there will be no drinking water crisis in the Cauvery basin.