Srisailam Reservoir Row: KRMB Tells Telangana to Halt Power Generation Drawals

The Krishna River Management Board (KRMB) has directed Telangana to stop drawing water from the Srisailam reservoir for hydro-electric generation, warning that current depletion rates threaten drinking water supplies in the coming months. The directive, issued after a three-member committee meeting ended without consensus on water-sharing in a declared lean year, marks the latest flashpoint in the persistent inter-state friction over the Krishna River system.

What Triggered the Directive

Andhra Pradesh communicated to the KRMB on Friday that water storage in Srisailam was depleting rapidly owing to "excessive drawal of water for power generation by TG-Genco" (Telangana's power utility). Acting on this complaint, the Board wrote to the Telangana Secretary of the Irrigation Department, invoking the Eleventh Schedule of the A.P. Reorganisation Act 2014 to set the priority hierarchy.

The core operative clause of the Schedule establishes a cascading preference: when irrigation and power compete, irrigation wins; when irrigation and drinking water compete, drinking water wins. Power generation sits at the bottom of this hierarchy. As of Saturday, official figures show Andhra Pradesh drawing 15,355 cusecs from Srisailam — nearly 1.5 tmc ft per day — through multiple outlets, while Telangana draws 2,400 cusecs via the Kalwakurthy lift scheme.

• ▸Srisailam reservoir is located on the Krishna River straddling the Andhra Pradesh–Telangana border in the Nallamala hill range
• ▸The Eleventh Schedule's priority cascade applies uniformly to all riparian infrastructure on the river
• ▸TG-Genco operates the Srisailam Hydro-Electric Project, one of the largest hydropower installations in the Deccan

The Telangana Counter

A senior engineer in Telangana's Irrigation Department has pushed back, alleging that the KRMB's communication reflects a "biased attitude" by remaining silent on Andhra Pradesh's drawals through the Pothireddypadu Head Regulator (a free-flow gravity drawal), the Handri-Neeva lift, the KC Canal lift at Malyala, and the newer Veligonda project. Telangana has also flagged Andhra Pradesh's unilateral release of water from Nagarjunasagar's Right Canal in late August as the trigger that forced Telangana onto the Left Canal.

The Geography Beneath the Dispute

The Krishna basin covers roughly 2.6 lakh square kilometres across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh, with a mean annual water availability significantly below the cumulative demand of all four riparian states. The river itself rises in the Western Ghats near Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra and flows eastward across the Deccan Plateau for about 1,400 km before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

Srisailam and the downstream Nagarjunasagar together form a coupled reservoir system that regulates the river's lower reaches. Because these projects sit in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, their catchment receives substantially less rainfall than the upper basin — making every tmc ft of storage politically contested. The current lean year, exacerbated by El Niño conditions weakening the southwest monsoon, has compressed the buffer that normally absorbs competing demands.

• ▸The Krishna River Water Disputes Tribunal (Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal, 1969, with subsequent clarifications) has been the primary allocator of basin waters
• ▸Entry 56 of the Union List places "water supply, sanitation, and inter-state rivers" squarely within Parliament's legislative domain
• ▸The KRMB was constituted as a statutory mechanism under the A.P. Reorganisation Act precisely to operationalise tribunal allocations in real time

Why the Board Has Limited Teeth

The KRMB's authority rests on persuasion and reference to the statutory Schedule rather than on punitive power — it cannot unilaterally order a state to release or stop releasing water. Its effectiveness depends on whether the Centre, which controls the Board's composition, is prepared to back its findings with political pressure. Telangana's Irrigation Department has openly questioned the Board's impartiality while stopping short of rejecting the directive outright, signalling that the state is calculating its response rather than simply defying it.

The unresolved question from Friday's committee meeting — the operational formula for water-sharing in lean years — is the structural gap that allows the same dispute to recur each summer. Until the KRMB or a successor mechanism secures binding real-time data on every outlet's drawal, and until the cascading priority of the Eleventh Schedule is converted from a textual principle into an enforceable flow schedule, the Srisailam reservoir will remain the arena where Deccan geography, federal river politics, and monsoon variability collide every dry season.