280 TMCft claim needs a white paper, not slogans
Harish Rao has challenged the Telangana Congress government’s Krishna-water accounting. The department that keeps the records has not published the table that would settle it.
The department’s project-wise Krishna-water table remains unpublished.
The Congress government’s Krishna-water arithmetic has arrived without the arithmetic. BRS leader Harish Rao has challenged the reported claim that Telangana used 280 TMCft and demanded a white paper from Irrigation Minister N. Uttam Kumar Reddy.
The demand is not unreasonable. Telangana’s Irrigation and CAD Department says its Planning and Monitoring unit collects project data and compiles irrigation-status reports. Yet the public material located does not include the 280 TMCft calculation, project-wise utilisation figures, or the denominator behind the reported percentages.
The record available so far is untidy. One published report put Telangana’s 2024–25 use at about 285 TMCft, or roughly 28% of combined use. Another, quoting irrigation officials, recorded 116.9 TMCft for Telangana and 533.53 TMCft for Andhra Pradesh in 2025–26 at the time of reporting — about 17.97% of the combined total, not 25%.
The figures may use different dates or definitions. That is precisely why the department should publish the table instead of leaving Telangana to conduct water accounting by press release. The Congress government has not publicly answered the demand in the material located. Its records are apparently still waiting for their public debut.