HYDERABAD: Achi Reddy believes that the drinking water that’s pumped from the Nagarjuna Sagar to Hyderabad rightfully ought to irrigate his farm. “How is it fair that we who live 20km from the canal have no water but Hyderabad does?” Good question. And the short-shrift answer is that Hyderabad is an 11 billion dollar powerhouse and the largest contributor to Telangana’s GDP, fully a third of its receipts, and this farmer is whining about losing his last two crops, chilli and cotton, two acres and three?
The 37-year-old Achi Reddy is aware that he and the 10,000 people of Peddavoora mandal in Nalgonda district of Telangana have no exclusive rights to the multi-purpose project, one of the three ‘temples of modern India’ that Jawaharlal Nehru consecrated in 1955. His gripe is that by a strange convolution of ‘development’, Hyderabad has ended up with exclusive rights to the water.
Together with the Bhakra Nangal in Punjab and the Hirakud in Odisha, Nagarjuna Sagar kicked off the planning era in India, and was to be the nation’s answer to famine. Billed as the biggest masonry dam in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar was the kind of project Films Division documentaries would extol to cinema audiences in the 1960s. The project was dedicated to the nation by Indira Gandhi in 1967, in the thick of Green Revolution patriotism, and Nagarjuna Sagar became an emblem of Socialist pride.
Today it’s a disappointment to Achi Reddy. Water in the reservoir is at dead storage level, typical for this time of the year but not much worse than in the other lean months. Save for a week or two, when flash inflows into the Narayanpur and Almatti reservoirs upstream of the Krishna fill it up, Nagarjuna Sagar is a half empty cup, a chalice of woe to farmers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Achi Reddy lives in Peddagudem village, 15km from the left bank of Nagarjuna Sagar’s Left canal. Today, taking me on a visit to his farm, he points to what looks like a ditch adjacent to his farm. “That’s what is left of the sub-canal. It’s filled up with earth now. Water was supposed to come here from the Left canal. They dug it back in 2005. But till today there has not been a single drop of water,” he says.
Indeed, last December, 84,000 cusecs of water was released for 12 days from the Left canal to wet 2.3 lakh acres. That water never reached Peddagudem. “It goes to Kammam district 179 km away,” says Achi Reddy, spitting out a flake of tobacco. He’s an angry man because he’s been flitting from crop to crop for as long as he can remember. This year, he sowed chilli on two out of his five acres, and BT cotton on three, trusting ground water more than that ditch out there.
Last year, he had turned to onions but then the prices crashed and he burnt his fingers. After the monsoon last year, he bid to recover his losses with a good wager on chilli. Same result. His risk-spread crop of cotton came out even stevens. Had there been water in the darned ditch, he might have sown paddy, Achi Reddy thinks.
Peddagudem is a 200-year-old village. Seventy-year-old Pichi Reddy, no relation, has only a dim memory of the day Jawaharlal Nehru came down for the foundation stone ceremony in 1955, when he was eight, but remembers more vividly the visit of Indira Gandhi for the dedication in 1967, when he was 20.
Villages in this part of Nalgonda used to grow ragi and bajra until the Krishna was dammed at Nandikonda. Nagarjuna Sagar triggered a switch to paddy. It was a switch thousands of farmers made along both canals, Right and Left, encouraged by Green Revolution planners who measured food security in terms of rice and wheat. Given the new access to water, farmers of Nalgonda in Telangana and Guntur and Prakasam in Andhra Pradesh abandoned millets for rice.
It was a phenomenon encouraged by planners who were seduced by the higher lysine content of rice.
Between 1970 and 2011, rice cultivation Andhra Pradesh increased from 3.1 million hectares to 4.3mn while coarse grain area dwindled from 4.1mn to 0.3 million hectares.
Farmers also switched to what used to be called ‘cash crops’, but are now a major factor in farmer suicides. In 1970 the share of food crops used to be 70 per cent, which diminished to 53.6 per cent in 2011. Concurrently, the share of cotton for instance rose from 2.5 per cent to 8.2 per cent.
But Nalgonda never made it to the Green Revolution. “The Left canal did not even serve 10 per cent of Nalgonda,” says K Nimmaiah, who heads People’s Action for Creative Education (PEACE), an NGO that works with small and marginal farmers in Nalgonda. “Until the 1980s, sorghum was the staple crop here. Many dryland acres had mixed cropping systems which ensured food security for the people of the region. But thereafter it was all paddy and the government was behind it all.”
Millets are drought-resistant and need less water, pesticide and fertilizer. Most importantly, for a region not adequately served by the credit system, they needed less investment than paddy.
By the mid 1970s, the big switch to rice and the need for more and more water arranged themselves into a neat self-feeding cycle. Since water from the Nagarjuna Sagar was never enough anyway, Nalgonda farmers dug for ground water. A major part of the activities taken up by the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) of the 1970s, a precursor of today’s MGNREGS, was digging community wells. This led to further expansion of paddy.
“Who ate rice during that era,” says Nimmaiah. “It was only the rich landlords. Working class people used to eat millet rotis.”
Nalgonda is a rain shadow region and has been having recurrent droughts from the 1970s ever since ground water exploitation took root. Nearly half a century of digging borewells has led to a drop in groundwater. In Nalgonda there’s 83 per cent fall.
Average annual reservoir levels (ft)
1984-85: 523.8
1985-86: 511.7
1986-87: 521.3
1987-88: 520.1
1989-90: 507.3
1990-91: 504.4
1992-93: 511.90
1994- 95: 499.8
1995-96: 499.8
1995-96: 500.7
1996-97: 507
1997-98: 516.2
1999-00: 513.5
2000-01: 520.9
2001-02: 505.6
2002-03: 506.9
2003- 04:500.41
2004- 05: 495.6
2005-06: 504
2006 -07: 543.9
2007-08: 521.8
2008-09: 542.6
2009-10: 504.6
2010-11: 520.7
2011-12: 554.1
2013-14: 519.6
2014-15: 517.5
2015-16: 514.5
2016-17: 506.6
84,000 cusecs of water was released in last December for 12 days. Though it was supposed to water 2.3 lakh acres, Peddagudem never got the water.
(The CWB’s data are contested by local people. The report states that the deepest one has to dig for water in Nalgonda is 20 m, but Peddagudem farmer Gopal Reddy said he found no water even at 30 m when he dug a borewell for his 10 acre farm earlier this year.)