KURNOOL: The bare facts of India’s creeping drought and its cruel cousin, water scarcity, are frightening enough: 260 districts and 330 million people affected by it; the first trace of moisture available at 100m below ground level in Rajasthan; reservoirs down to 10 per cent of storage in the south. If there’s one place where all that is blasé in India, bar the Thar desert, it is Rayalaseema in Andhra Pradesh, a crucible of drought for as long as anyone can remember.
Rayalaseema is synonymous with drought — a far cry from popular lore that during the time of the Vijayanagara kingdom merchants would sell rubies by the maund in the markets here. The poets, we hear, used to call it Ratanalaseema — country of jewels. But this year, 2017, might well be the apogee from those days. For Ratanalaseema is staring at its worst water scarcity and all its attendant phenomena since Krishnadevaraya.
As we speak, storage in Rayalaseema’s 28 major and medium irrigation projects, with a combined capacity of 129.09 tmc ft, is down to 13.18 tmc ft, or 10.21 per cent. Groundwater is at rock bottom: 20.52m below ground level (bgl). In Anantapur district, you encounter moisture at 26.79m, which is comparable to 30m in Ramgarh, on the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan. The other three districts are little better: Chittoor 21.84m, Kadapa 21.45m and Kurnool 11.90m. Note that the last named is watered by the Tungabhadra, which is bone dry this year.
Add to this, a majority of the 12,952 irrigation and drinking water tanks have gone dry.
Last year’s monsoon was poor, not as shockingly poor as in Tamil Nadu, which had the worst monsoon in 140 years, but numbingly, ceaselessly, continuously poor. All the four Rayalaseema districts recorded deficit rainfall with Anantapur again the most in deficit.
For the first time in years, Mantralayam, the temple town in Kurnool which used to be flooded by the Tungabhadra, is facing an acute water scarcity and so are all the mandals around it. Even pits dug on the riverbed refuse to ooze water. This had never happened before. The situation is worse in Adoni, Alur, Aspari, Kodumur, Nandavaram and 29 other mandals in the district. The water shortage is forcing people from western Kurnool mandals to migrate. Some have sold their livestock to slaughterhouses while some have set them loose to bellow their guts out on the dry river beds and die.
As for Kurnool, the district HQ, it is one of the worst affected urban areas in AP today. The city’s lone water source, the Sunkesula barrage on the Tungabhadra, has dried up. So officials draw upon the dregs in the Gajula Dinne project. But with the sun so fierce, 40 per cent of the water evaporates before it reaches the city. Some 50 cusecs are let out of Gajula Dinne; 30 cusecs reach Kurnool. Out of 51 divisions in the city, 27 get water for 30 minutes alternate days, while the remaining 24 get water once in five.
The situation in Adoni is such that you are lucky to land a pot of water once in two days. People pool up and buy a water tankerload for Rs 2,500. But given the fast depleting ground water, who knows for how long?
Kurnool is in the backyard of massive Srisailam project, but regulations stipulate that it cannot use that water. This sets up a weird reality: Kurnool has little storage capacity, just 611 tanks out of the 12,952 in the region. So water for the rest of the region flows through the district, but Kurnool can’t tap it.
But it is in Anantapur district that you see the drought as the eternal normal. It is the biggest district in AP and the driest. Its rivers, the Pennar and Chiravati, are dry round the year. It has the second lowest annual rainfall average (510 mm) in the country. It has 2,502 water projects — 303 minor, two major and five medium — but what use are they? This is the seventh consecutive drought year in Anantapur. According to P Subramanyam Sarma, a retired irrigation department engineer, the district needs 100 tmc ft to survive.
We come to groundwater. The water table has sunk to 26.71 m, the deepest in the state, and the dread of May is still ahead.
In Chittoor, the western mandals are the dry zone, where 70 per cent of the 8,063 tanks are bare earth.
There are five medium irrigation projects here, but they are dry. The Kalyani dam near Tirupati serves the needs of the god of Tirumala, but the deity of Srikalahasti, the other big temple town, has to make alternative arrangements as the Swarnamukhi has dried up.
In this bleak landscape, Kuppam is a lucky town because it is the constituency of CM Chandrababu Naidu. The Rural Water Supply Department supplies drinking water to 650 habitations in the district, but 40 per cent of it goes to Kuppam villages. Of all the four Rayalaseema districts, Kadapa fares relatively better in the drought this year.