Telangana counts water stress as Andhra counts 500 TMC
A political claim puts Telangana’s alleged downstream flow above 1,000 TMCft. The public records are thinner, and the accounting dispute is older than the latest press conference.
The water dispute still awaits a ledger.
Telangana is short of rain, short of storage and apparently still expected to conduct its water accounting through political speeches. The state’s official irrigation dashboard recorded 596.8 mm of rainfall against a normal 826.83 mm on 15 October 2026 — a deficit of 27.82%. Reservoirs held 492.53 TMC against total capacity of 1,059.3 TMC, while minor irrigation tanks held 93.51 TMC, or 36.85% of capacity. [1]
Against that backdrop, BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao alleged that more than 1,000 TMCft of Godavari and Krishna water had flowed downstream from Telangana since 1 June: over 750 TMCft from the Godavari and 250 TMCft from the Krishna. He blamed the Congress government in Telangana, saying, “This is not a drought brought by fate, but one created by Congress,” and questioned the operation of the Kannepalli, Devadula, Palamuru-Rangareddy and Kalwakurthy pumping schemes. [2]
That is an allegation, not an established statewide water balance. The available material contains no project-wise gauge tables, pump logs, power records or barrage-discharge calculations supporting the 1,000-TMCft figure. One documented project does show the scale of the question: Sriramsagar reportedly received 42.618 TMC from the Godavari between 1 June and 11 October and released 13.911 TMC during that period. Its storage was reported at 44.713 TMC. Those figures do not by themselves prove waste; the missing water balance is precisely the problem. [3]
Across the border, the TDP government in Andhra Pradesh is publicly claiming that Pattiseema transferred about 500 TMCft to the Krishna basin over 11 years. The claim has appeared in multiple reports, but no audited project ledger is available in the material reviewed. The Krishna River Management Board’s own reports confirm the larger embarrassment: Pattiseema accounting and the sharing ratio between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana remain disputed, with AP seeking 66:34 and Telangana seeking 50:50 in 2023–24. [4][5]
The Congress government in Telangana has promised to defend the state’s water rights. It has not published the operating records needed to show whether it did the job. Delhi’s domestic water politics are no help, Andhra’s diversion machine is not waiting, and Hyderabad is still being offered declarations instead of a ledger. The state needs pumps that run and records that survive arithmetic.