With the 15-day spell of water release, as fixed by the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA), coming to an end on Tuesday, and the storage of the Mettur dam continuing to dwindle, Tamil Nadu is set to demand, at a meeting of the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC), that Karnataka wipe out a shortfall of about nine thousand million cubic feet (tmc ft).
The Committee’s meeting is scheduled to be held in hybrid mode on Tuesday. When the CWRC last met on August 28, it recommended that 5,000 cusecs be released for 15 days, and this was accepted by the CWMA, which met the following day.
Last week, Karnataka submitted before the Supreme Court that it might not be feasible to release any water from its reservoirs after September 12, citing a “severe drought situation” in the Cauvery and Krishna basins.
The quantity of the shortfall has been worked out by Tamil Nadu as per a distress-sharing formula, and this pertains to the period from June 1 to August 27, the date before the last meeting of the CWRC. Taking into account 30-year data on deficit in inflows into four Karnataka reservoirs, Tamil Nadu had, in a rejoinder filed before the Supreme Court last month to an affidavit of the upper riparian State, referred to the cumulative realisation of 30.254 tmc ft, as recorded at Biligundulu on the inter-State border. It contended that as per the formula, the State should have received 40.226 tmc ft. This meant there was a shortfall of 9.972 tmc ft.
Meanwhile, the storage of the Mettur dam was 15.327 tmc ft while the water level stood at 45.9 ft. The discharge was 6,502 cubic feet per second while the inflow was 2,266 cusecs. If the present trend continues, it is only a matter of time before the release of water from the dam is stopped.
