VIJAYAWADA: Reservoirs in the state are more than 65 per cent full just one month after Summer and the early release of irrigation water for Kharif. Comparatively, it was only 52 per cent last year on the same day.
As on Saturday, reservoirs in the state put together have 645.51 TMC, which is 65.63 per cent as compared to 515.1 TMC last year on the same day, which is 52.37 per cent. As of date, 590.7 TMC of water is there in the major reservoirs of the State.
Among the major reservoirs, Srisailam has large volumes of water stored compared to last year. As against full reservoir levels of 215.81 TMC, the current storage in the project is 201.44 TMC. Last year on the same day it was as low as 86.78 TMC. With copious inflows, the water levels to are expected to increase.
Nagarjuna Sagar project at present has 186.87 TMC compared to 180.91 TMC last year on the same day as against full reservoir levels of 312.05 TMC. Now with the release of water from Srisailam to Nagarjuna Sagan Project, levels of the latter are expected to increase significantly in the coming one week, the Pulichintala project as against its FRL of 45.77 TMC, has 38.18 TMC. It was 43.04 TMC last year. Now it is expected to increase once NSP has significant levels of water stored by August first week.
Yeleru Reservoir now has 11.08 TMC as against 11. 28 TMC last year, while Somasila has 55.73 TMC as against 52.72 TMC last year. The FRL of the project is 78 TMC. Kandaleru project now has 28.72 TMC of water as against 37.58 TC last year. The FRL of the project is 68.03 TMC. Gandikonta another major reservoir has 21.97 TMC as again 24.47 TMC and is expected to increase in the coming couple of weeks. There are several other major irrigation projects with less than 10 TMC of storage capacity and the majority of them have water levels stored at half their capacity already.
Medium reservoirs put together as of date have storage of 53.81 TMC, which is 46.6 per cent of the total capacity of 115.09 TMC. Last year it was only 40.43 TMC (35.14 %) of water stored. Other projects which contributed 0.8 TMC of water as of date have contributed 1 TMC today to the total water storage levels.