For the second year in succession, the Kuruvai, a short-term paddy crop in Cauvery Delta, Tamil Nadu’s rice bowl, has remained a non-starter due to water shortage.
Preparations for the Kuruvai crop should have begun in the first week of June. Since there is not enough water in the Mettur Dam in Tamil Nadu, farmers foresaw the writing on the wall and opted out of the short-term crop. This means that the entire farming community in the Cauvery Delta spread across the four fertile districts along River Cauvery is in for major financial crisis. The Kuruvai is cultivated in more than five lakh acres in the districts of Thiruvaroor, Tiruchi, Nagapattinam, Thanjavur and parts of Cuddalore.
Water is released from Mettur Dam on every June 12 which sustains the Kuruvai crop, the main cash crop of the farmers in the Delta districts. Since Karnataka did not release water this year, the Kuruvai dreams of farmers in Tamil Nadu withered in the beginning.
The Mettur Dam could be opened only if the water level is above the 90 ft mark. But on Monday morning the water level stood at 16ft mark making it clear that the dam could not be opened even in July. “There is no water even for drinking purpose. Though there has been copious rainfall in Kerala and Karnataka, the water from Krishna Raja Sagar Dam in Karnataka has not reached Mettur Dam. Farmers in the Cauvery Delta are in for distress,” said S Ranganathan, the septuagenarian farmer told The Pioneer over telephone from Mannargudi.
Ranganathan who also heads the Cauvery Delta Farmers’ Welfare Association, blamed the Centre for its failure in constituting the Cauvery Water Management Board as per the directive of the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal. “The monitoring agency looking after the responsibilities of the CWMB is a toothless body. Though the Tribunal issued the final orders in 2007, the Union Government deliberately delayed the constitution of the CWMB for obvious reasons,” said Ranganathan.
Farmers like Kattumannarkoil Kannan and Virudachalam Giri said the entire farming community in Tamil Nadu are up in arms against the Manmohan Singh Government for its failure to resolve the water shortage in south India.
“In 2004, the UPA Government had promised that they would make a comprehensive assessment of the feasibility of linking the rivers of the country starting with the south-bound rivers. The promise was made against the backdrop of the National Democratic Alliance Government’s decision to take up the inter-linking of the country’s major rivers at a cost of Rs 6 lakh crore,” said Kannan.
According to Giri, a farmer-cum-leader of the Consortium of Indian Farmers Associations (CIFA), the main attraction of the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA-1 was its promise to take up the inter-linking ofpeninsular Indian rivers. “But they dilly-dallied the issue while flood and draught ravaged the country every year since 2004,” said Giri.
Though the apex court too asked the Government to complete the inter-linking of major rivers in a time-bound manner, the UPA Government showed scant regards to the court directive. Meanwhile, every year States like Uttarkhand, Assam, Bihar, Bengal and Odisha suffer the fury of floods, landslides and landslips.
Prof PM Natarajan, director, Centre For Climate Change, Periyar Maniammai University, Thanjavur, said there was surplus water in all the Karnataka rivers. “Netravati, Hemavathi and Herangi rivers are all overflowing and the surplus water are discharged into the Arabian sea. It would have been possible for us to divert the water to Cauvery through a series of link canals,” said Prof Natarajan.
The National Water Development Authority (NWDA) under the Ministry of Water Resources has finalised a proposal to divert surplus water from Netravati basin to water-deficient Cauvery basin in Tamil Nadu, pointed out Dr S Kalyanaraman, former director, Asian Development Bank. “Initially it was thought that a total of 6 MW power would be required to pump the water from Hemavathi basin to Cauvery. But it is possible to transfer the water through a tunnel of 8 km and there is no need of any pumping. All we have to do is to entrust the job to companies specialising in boring lengthy tunnels. Here in Chennai, 11 tunnel boring machines are making 9-km long tunnel underneath the city for the Metro Rail,” said Dr Kalyanaraman.
Enquiries with engineers leading the tunnel boring operations of the Chennai Metro Rail ltd revealed that it was not at all a big deal to make tunnels of any length and diametre. Dr Kalyanaraman said the diversion of flood water of Hemavathy and Netravathy to Cauvery would lead to a win-win situation for Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Pudussery.
“Tumkur, Hassan and Mandya districts, the drought-prone regions in Karnataka could be made ever green gardens once the project is completed. The entire water needs of the Cauvery Delta region too could be resolved with this project,” he said. Once the issue of the sharing of Cauvery water is resolved, people in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu can heave a sigh of relief since rioting and vandalism in the name of water too would become a thing of the past.