Multiple weirs in Karnataka, Maha throttle Krishna inflows into Telangana

HYDERABAD: Each year, Telangana waits with bated breath for news about River Krishna filling up Almatti reservoir. This Karnataka reservoir can store 129 TMCft of water and acts as a bellwether for what Telangana can expect from the river.“But we can expect Almatti to never reach its FRL (Full Reservoir Level). And when it does, water first goes to Narayanpur, also in Karnataka. Ideally , the water should reach the Jurala project in Telangana after water is released from Narayanpur. But these days, it's only a trickle that comes to us,“ said a Telangana irrigation department official.What is throttling Krishna's inflow into Telangana is the fact that Maharashtra and Karnataka have constructed thousands of Kolhapur Type (KT) Weirs across various rivulets and streams over the past two decades.None of these structures need approvals from any central monitoring agency, making it impossible for states downstream to know just how much water has been impounded upstream.Maharashtra has as many as 32,000 KT Weirs while Karnataka has a few thousand. This, according to one estimate, costs Telangana between 80-100 TMCft inflows each year. In other words, the water stored in such weirs can amount to nearly a third of what the Nagarjunasagar project, with a capacity of 312 TMCft, can hold, sources said.400 barrages built in two decadesIn addition to weirs, Karnataka and Maharashtra have also built larger barrages on the rivers that irrigate Telangana. In all, the state government has counted 400 barrages on Krishna and Godavari rivers. But for every one of them, the states have claimed that the barrages were part of existing projects, an official said. Any time we raise a question, we are told that they are meant to use already allocated water for a specific project. For instance, Karnataka built the Girijapur road-cum-barrage downstream of Narayanpur that cuts inflows into Jurala. “Karnataka claims that Narayanpur was built on the premise of using 110% of intensity of irrigation and that it brought it down to 100% now, which leaves 10% to be exploited. This, it says, is what Girjapur barrage is meant for,“ an irrigation official said.