V Rishi Kumar
With most of the major reservoirs in Karnataka on the river Krishna nearly full, more rains in the catchment areas of the Krishna and Godavari river systems has boosted the prospect of dams downstream getting fresh inflows.
Bringing cheer to the farming community, both rivers flooding in Maharashtra and Karnataka upstream, has resulted in release of water benefiting downstream reservoirs.
Water levels have shot up in Kadem dam in Telangana and irrigation officials opened the crest gates after performing puja.
Pumping system
There has been copious inflow into the Godavari at Kaleshwaram which has helped the irrigation authorities to use the recently set up pumping system to evacuate water and transfer it upstream into the river system through the lift irrigation projects.
This would augur well for the newly developed barrages on the Godavari to harness the flood water, which otherwise heads to the sea.
In the case of Krishna, both reservoirs at Almatti and Narayanpur dams are near full. Karnataka irrigation authorities released water to Jurala, which is the first project in Telangana on Krishna. It is receiving about 90,641 cusecs of water from Narayanpur and other tributaries. This has helped begin hydel power generation from three of its stations and release of water to Srisailam dam.
This will mean flood water flow into Srisailam project, which is now at a low of 804 feet as against full reservoir level (FRL) of 885 feet. Only after this dam gets filled up, the water gets released to Nagarjunasagar dam downstream, where the water level now is at 509 feet as against FRL of 590 feet.
The water inflow has been going up at both Almatti and Narayanpur dams and this augurs well for dams in Telangana. The Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dam levels are crucial for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for hydel power generation, irrigation and drinking water.
While Srisailam dam has storage capacity of 215 TMC, it is now holding 31 TMC, and Nagarjunasgar has 126 TMC as against full capacity of 312 TMC.
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