Tungabhadra Dam to reduce allocations by Nov. 10; cut in allocations

Anantapur: The TB dam authorities have decided to stop water release by November 10 following a cut in allocations due to poor storage and an ever-worse situation during the past decade.

During the 2nd water committee meeting held at the superintendent engineers’ level at Tungabhadra dam in Hospet, the abstraction of water estimated as per available inflows to the dam was reassessed as 105 tmc-ft for the present season.

Accordingly, the AP high level main canal quota was estimated at 16.097 tmc-ft. Out of this, 8.55 tmc-ft of water has already been drawn so far, and the balance to be drawn is 7.547 tmc-ft for the rest of the year.

TB dam officials said the inflows into HLMC will be stopped by  November 10, if there are no further inflows to the dam.

Accordingly it was decided to revise the drawl patterns from the TB Dam, HLC superintendent engineer Rajasekhar said.

 In fact, TB dam carried only 52.74 tmc-ft water on Friday as against last year’s 105.79 tmc-ft level. The 10-year average capacity was 84.09 tmc-ft.

Shockingly, the total yield from the dam was assessed at 106 tmc-ft as against the 526 tmc-ft during last year, due to the failure of south west monsoon at the early stage this year.

The reports revealed that TB dam maintained full storage capacity of 103 tmc-ft for more than two and a half months and even the inflows were 23,728 cusecs the same day last year.

Following drastic conditions, the TB dam authorities alerted all dependent divisions of Karnataka, AP and TS to make changes in their utilisation for irrigation and power generation.