The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Jayalalithaa pleads for release of Telugu Ganga water

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Sep 04, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Jayalalithaa pleads for release of Telugu Ganga water

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, SEPT. 3. The Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, has sought the "urgent intervention" of her Andhra Pradesh counterpart, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, to open the Telugu Ganga Project (TGP) canal from the Srisailam headworks to tide over the water crisis in Chennai city.

In a letter to Mr. Reddy yesterday, she said the city had been reeling under an unprecedented water crisis following the "total failure" of the last Northeast monsoon in the catchment areas of the three supply reservoirs.

As per the Telugu Ganga agreement, Andhra Pradesh was to release 12 tmcft annually at 8 tmcft from July to October and 4 tmcft from January to April at Zero Point to meet the city's drinking water needs, she pointed out.

Lowest storage

Even by the end of December 2003, the storage in the three reservoirs had gone down to the lowest level known in 54 years of recorded history, she said. Now they had gone completely dry. The current Southwest monsoon had also been a failure, with the city recording a large deficit in rainfall. "Piped water supply has been completely stopped."

Minimum supply was being maintained by a "superhuman effort" only by transporting water from far-off places by tankers. "Still we are finding it difficult to provide even the minimum requirement for Chennai city."

The storage in the Srisailam reservoir had been built up with copious inflows, which would enable the flow of the required quantum through the TGP canal into the Somasila reservoir and from there to Kandaleru and to the Poondi reservoir in Tamil Nadu, she said.

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