The Hindu                09.10.2013

Telangana protests hit water supply

The Telangana issue and the turmoil in Andhra Pradesh
have had an impact on the drinking water supply to Chennai. In the last
two days, the release of Krishna water to the city was disrupted as
agitators in the neighbouring State attempted closing shutters enroute.

Water
Resources Department (WRD) officials said the volume of water received
at Uthukottai, Tiruvallur district — Tamil Nadu’s entry point of
Kandaleru Poondi canal — dwindled to 65 cubic feet per second (cusecs)
on Tuesday. (One cusec is equal to 2.4 million litres per day (mld)).

Agitators
closed the shutters of the canal near Thottambedu and Kalahasti.
Officials in Andhra Pradesh re-opened the shutters soon but the flow of
Krishna water reduced to less than 100 cusecs. The water discharge was
suspended in three or four places as a mark of protest.

However,
the WRD officials here are confident that the water discharge would
improve in the coming days. The Kandaleru reservoir that supplies water
to Chennai has been getting a steady inflow from the reservoirs upstream
and has storage of 15 thousand million cubic feet (tmcft). On Tuesday,
about 600 cusecs was released into the 152 km-long Kandaleru Poondi (KP)
canal.

“We must be receiving a minimum of 250 cusecs
at Poondi reservoir after release of water to Tirupathi and Kalahasti,”
said an official.

Officials in the State are in
constant communication with their counterparts in Andhra Pradesh to
ensure that Krishna water flows to Chennai at the usual rate. “We have
so far received 1.24 tmcft of water since July. This helped in
maintaining the drinking water supply at a rate of 550 mld on alternate
days,” said an official.

With the available resources
in the reservoirs, including those at Poondi, Red Hills and
Chembarambakkam, Chennai could be supplied with drinking water for three
more months.

Meanwhile, work to repair a stretch of
the KP canal and build an aqueduct to allow the Ubbalamadugu stream near
Tada to flow freely beneath the canal is expected to be completed by
this year-end. Once it is ready, Chennai can receive as much as 1,000
cusecs of Krishna water.