Officials assess irrigation demand under Krishna basin projects

As far as the Krishna basin projects are concerned, the worst is over and the inflows being received for the last one week are holding out hope for a normal year, irrigation officials said.

Hyderabad: Officials have taken up the task of assessing the precise irrigation demand for the Kharif season under the various major and medium projects. As far as the Krishna basin projects are concerned, the worst is over and the inflows being received for the last one week are holding out hope for a normal year, irrigation officials said.

They are busy estimating the water requirement taking into consideration the historical data and the area covered so far by irrigation intensive crops so as to work out the project wise irrigation schedules. Water is likely to be released to the first Zone of NSP Left canal in the second week of August.

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The Nagarjuna Sagar project started receiving an inflow of over 50,000 cusecs while the flood flow into the Srisailam project continued to be over four lakh cusecs. The Jurala project is getting an inflow of over 3 lakh cusecs. Both Nagarjuna Sagar and Srisailam, joint projects of both the Telugu States have a flood cushion of nearly 300 TMC to fill the reservoirs to their gross capacity. In Srisailam, the present storage has touched 127 TMC as against the gross storage capacity of 215 TMC. So far as the NSP is concerned, it started receiving significant inflows since Friday.

Its present storage is only 127 TMC as against the gross storage capacity of 312 TMC. Both the Karnataka projects- Almatti and Narayanpur have been letting out a flood flow of over 3 lakh cusecs each. The Tungabhadra dam is also discharging over 1.58 lakh cusecs adding to the inflows into Srisailam.