ANANTAPUR: Heaviest floods in the Hagari/Vedavati river for the first time in 100 years caused huge losses to farmers in the riverbed areas of Rayadurgam.
TD politburo member Kaluva Srinivasulu, who visited the affected areas and interacted with the farmers, said at least 70,000 acres of agricultural fields including orchards were submerged. This meant a Rs 500 crore loss to farmers in Anantapur and Satya Sai districts, he said.
He alleged that a lack of timely alert to the farmers and people residing in the low-lying areas over the releasing of outflows from the dam into the river resulted in massive flooding and heavy loss to the farmers. Many of these farmers had invested their hard-earned income in their agriculture fields after working on daily wage in Bengaluru city, he said.
The Hagari riverbed, including the sand dunes in Kanekal mandal, has been a scene of desertification in Anantapur district for the past two decades. Efforts by successive governments to develop greenery in these areas did not yield any result.
Hagari river is a major source of irrigation in Karnataka through several projects but the water from the river does not help AP even during the rainy season. However, for the first time in recent history, the river was flowing above the danger mark. As a result, the Bhairavani Thippa project discharged more than 66,000 cusecs of water downstream of the river in the current season.
Criticising the alleged “negligence” of elected representatives from the YSRC and the state government, the TD leader said not a single leader did anything to help the people out of the heavy floods in the region in the past 15 days.
Sunkanna, a small farmer from Rayadurgam area migrated to Bengaluru as construction labourer and invested Rs 50,000 in groundnut crop. The entire crop was covered by sand after a heavy flow of floodwaters via the Hagari river.
A woman farmer cultivated tomatoes in 6 acres and bindi in two acres. The entire effort was lost in the floods. “If authorities alerted us in advance, it could have helped us,” she stated.
The Vedavati river flows 50km in three mandals – Brahmasamudram, Kanekal and Bommanhal. More than 100 villages in these mandals were flooded.
The Pennar and Krishna basins continued to receive heavy floods. Krishna basin reservoirs together had 536.15tmc-ft, filling 96.31 per cent of their storage capacity of 586.21tmc-ft so far in Karnataka and Telangana.
Heavy rains and constant flow of Tungabhadra and Krishna river areas continued to have heavy inflows to the Srisailam reservoir. On Sunday, the inflow was 3.39 lakh cusecs followed by 3.44 lakh cusecs of outflows into the river. Floods to Tungabhadra dam were reduced and the outflows were confined to 35,000 cusecs towards AP.
