Telangana’s Water Plan: Lose It, Then Review It

Telangana’s Congress government has discovered drought. Not the drought itself, obviously. That appears to have been discovered by the reservoirs. The administration has discovered it in the more comfortable format: a review meeting, a package request and a phrase about ensuring that “not even a drop of water is wasted”. The water, meanwhile, has been doing its own thing.

On October 10, Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy reviewed El Niño and drought conditions. By October 18, the government’s irrigation dashboard showed rainfall at 597.78 mm against a normal 835.74 mm, reservoir storage at 480.02 TMC out of 1,059.3 TMC, and minor irrigation tanks at 36.85 per cent full. The government says 315 mandals face drought-like conditions. This is the Congress model of crisis management: wait until the crisis acquires a number, then hold a meeting large enough to make the press release feel irrigated.

Agriculture Minister Tummala Nageswara Rao has asked officials to protect standing crops and maintain irrigation and power supply until harvest. The Chief Minister wants ₹20,000 crore from Delhi and another 50 days of rural employment. Both demands may be justified. But a special package is not a substitute for operating the infrastructure Telangana already built. K T Rama Rao’s claim that more than 750 TMC of Godavari water and 250 TMC of Krishna water flowed downstream, while pumps including Kannepalli, Devadula, Palamuru–Rangareddy and Kalwakurthy were not fully used, is a political charge. The government’s own figures still leave the central embarrassment intact: storage is low, tanks are lower, and the farmers are being asked to live inside an administrative afterthought.

Revanth Reddy has also asked who “handed over” Telangana’s Krishna water rights by agreeing to 299 TMC. That is a legitimate question. It would be more useful if it arrived with a plan for the water Telangana can still use, rather than another guided tour through the previous government’s sins. When water is available, the pumps become somebody else’s ideology. When it is gone, the blame list expands to El Niño, Delhi, the previous government, the river and the calendar.

Telangana did not elect Revanth Reddy to conduct an annual seminar on why circumstances are unfair. It elected him to run the system in front of him. A government that lets a shortage mature into a drought briefing is not unlucky; it is unprepared. The administration has not run out of explanations. It has run short of water.