Telangana state plans more irrigation projects on Godavari river

HYDERABAD: The Telangana government on Thursday opened a potential new front in the water wars with Andhra Pradesh by declaring that it will build projects on Godavari river in the state with a total storage and usage capacity of 400 tmc ft of water.

Andhra Pradesh is already opposing some projects on Krishna river proposed by the Telangana government, particularly the Palamuru-Ranga Reddy lift irrigation scheme, which it says cuts into AP's share of river water.

Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao said that as the upper riparian state for Andhra Pradesh, Telangana gets a share of 953 tmc ft of water each year. "While existing projects on the river in the state can use 433 tmc ft of water, 521 tmc ft are still untapped. We have permissions to use 400 tmc ft of unutilized water and projects must be designed to utilise that," he told a meeting of senior irrigation department officials here on Thursday. Irrigation minister T Harish Rao also attended the meet.

The chief minister also said that so far, projects on the Godavari were designed to benefit the Andhra region and that was the reason there were no irrigation projects on the side of the river in Telangana.

He added that the responsibility for surveying the river in the state and project design will be given to the Water and Power Consultancy Services (Wapcos), a central government undertaking. KCR said that the existing plans for Pranahita-Chevella irrigation project at Tammidihatti in Adilabad were unscientific.


He said that instead of going ahead with the project as envisaged, it would now be completed in a way that would serve Adilabad. A new project would be taken up at the downstream location on the river at Kaleswaram in Karimnagar district.

Until recently, the state government mooted scrapping of the Pranahita-Chevella project and constructing a new one at Kaleswaram, a proposal strongly objected by opposition parties. Nearly Rs 1,000 crore had already been spent on the project by the previous administrations which would have gone waste, the opposition parties said.

Plans are afoot to use the work already completed on the project to benefit irrigation in Adilabad, KCR said. The goal of the government was to provide irrigation for 1.5 lakh acres in every district of the state by using water from Godavari and other rivers judiciously, he added.

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