There is a need to further improve the per capita water availability as well as water storage capacity by conserving water and fighting for judicious water share of the State in Krishna and Godavari river basins, Officer on Special Duty to Chief Minister on irrigation, Sridhar Rao Deshpande has said. This is notwithstanding the fact that Telangana’s numbers are better than the national average, he added.
Speaking at a virtual event to mark the 220 th birth anniversary celebrations of General Sir Arthurs Thomas Cotton organised by the Telangana chapter of Institution of Engineers here on Sunday, he said the per capita water availability and per capita storage capacity in India was very low — at 1,545 cubic metres and 210 cubic metres, respectively. In Telangana, it was 920 cubic metres and 672 cubic metres, respectively.
Citing the statistics from a book authored by former chairman of the Central Water Commission A.B. Pandya, Mr. Deshpande said the per capita water availability and storage capacity was very high in countries such as Russia (31,883 cubic metres, 6,103 cubic metres), Australia (21,764 and 4,733), Brazil (41,865 and 3,145), USA (9,802 and 1,964), Turkey (2,890 and 1,739) and China (2,060 and 1,111).
He explained that Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao had taken up redesigning and re-engineering of projects to improve water availability in the State with new storage facilities, which was neglected badly during the combined Andhra Pradesh dispensation. Better water availability meant better ability to face stress that comes in the form of lean rainfall years and drought.
The climate change driven by environmental degradation world over and its impact on the monsoons on the Indian sub-continent was increasing every year, changing the rainfall patterns, and such a scenario would make it important to have huge water storage facilities to hold the rainfall that occurs only for 25 to 30 days in a year, he explained.
Executive director of Hyderabad Metro Water Works M. Satyanarayana, council member of IEI I. Satyanarayana Raju, chairman of IEI B. Brahma Reddy, secretary G. Venkata Subbaiah, Mohd. Mohinoddin and Ayodya Kavitha were among those who spoke.
