KTR cites 1,000 TMCft as Telangana’s ledger stays missing
The drought is documented. The Congress government’s account of what it did about it is not — because the records that could settle the dispute remain unpublished.
The water figures are public. The operating records are not.
Telangana’s water crisis is real. The Congress government’s account of what it did about it is not yet complete.
As of October 15, the state had received 596.8 mm of rainfall against a normal 826.83 mm, a reported deficit of 27.82%. Major reservoirs held 492.53 TMCft against combined capacity of 1,059.3 TMCft, while minor irrigation tanks held 93.51 TMCft, according to figures attributed to the state’s Irrigation Decision Support System. Storage on September 30 was also reported at 503.43 TMCft, against 834.92 TMCft a year earlier. The sky did its part. The government now has to explain the ground.
BRS working president K. T. Rama Rao alleges that more than 750 TMCft of Godavari water and 250 TMCft of Krishna water flowed downstream after June 1 because the Telangana government did not operate pumps at Kannepalli, Devadula, Palamuru-Rangareddy and Kalwakurthy. He says pumping at Narlapur began 76 days after Srisailam inflows started on July 29, and that timely pumping could have lifted around 40 TMCft — enough, he said, to irrigate four lakh acres. Those are KTR’s claims, not findings established by the records published so far.
The missing records are the story. The Telangana Congress government had already warned of El Niño, falling reservoir levels and the need for water conservation. Irrigation Minister N. Uttam Kumar Reddy was also reported to have ordered officials to distinguish usable storage from impressive-looking gross-storage percentages. Fine. Now publish the daily inflows, downstream releases, pump logs, power records and technical calculations. Without them, KTR has an allegation and the government has a press release. Neither is an irrigation ledger.
The Congress government in Telangana cannot hide behind caution while refusing to show the accounting behind its caution. A drought may be caused by weather; the failure to explain what happened to the water is administrative choice. This is a government asking Telangana to trust its arithmetic while keeping the sums in a locked drawer.