Hyderabad: The Srisailam project has added up to its present storage by close to 30 TMC in a span of four days baling out both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh States that were staring at an impending drinking water crisis last week. The inflows into the project continued to be over 1.38 lakh cusecs, yielding about 10 TMC of water a day.
Both the States, which placed fresh indents with the KRMB to meet their drinking water needs, were allotted nine TMC to be drawn mainly from the critical offtake level in Srisailam where in the water level had fallen much below the minimum draw down level of 834 feet. The water level in Srisailam rose up to 838 feet with the inflows received in the last four days.Now the drinking water issues are being fully addressed, the focus is mainly on the issue of meeting the irrigation needs. As both Nagarjuna Sagar and Pulichintala projects are in need of emergency supplies, the KRMB is planning to schedule water release from Srisailam to NSP in a day or two. The Pulichintala project has almost gone dry and no supplies could be given to the project unless there was some improvement in the storage level in the NSP.
The Jurala project continued to receive an inflow of over 1.68 lakh cusecs; while the flood flow into Tungabhadra dam came down to 92,500 cusecs. The inflows into the Almati and Narayanpur dams of Karnataka are in the order of 1.25 lakh cusecs and 1.48 lakh cusecs respectively.