WATER WOES: The Tirupati Municipal Chairperson and officials inspecting the depleted water level in the Kailasagiri reservoir on Thursday.

TIRUPATI: With the water level touching rock-bottom in the Kalyani and Kailasagiri reservoirs, the two main sources of drinking water, the temple town of Tirupati appears to be in for an acute water scarcity. The Tirupati Municipal Chairman, K. Sankar Redy, on Thrusday visited the two reservoirs to personally assess the gravity of the situation. He hinted at the inevitability of certain hard decisions to tide over the situation.

25 days' storage

The team which visited the Kailasagiri reservoir noted that a mere 25 MCFt of water available in it would last hardly 25 days even if it supplied water to the town for a mere 30 minutes daily. In this context Mr. Reddy feared that the municipality might have to discontinue the 50,000 gallons of water the municipality was supplying daily to the TTD from the Kalyanai reservoir and ask it to meet its requirements from its own Papanasam and Gogarbham dams located on the hills.

He blamed the present crisis on the Tirupati Congress MLA, M. Venkatramana, for having diverted the Kailasagiri water a few months ago to agricultural fields in the Ramapuram village and said that but for his unwarranted act, there would have been sufficient water available in the Kailasagiri to last another three months to meet the needs of both Tirupati and Tirumala.

He said he had discussed the grave situation with the Secretaries of Irrigation and Municipal Administration besides the Telugu Ganga Chief Engineer and requested them to immediately release Telugu Ganga water from Srisailam to Somasila so that it was sent to Tirupati via Kandaleru to Kailasagiri with the help of a pumping scheme. The scheme was executed during the TDP regime at a cost of Rs.80 crores to save the town from a similar situation in the past. But the supply from Srisailam is not likely to materialise as the authorities told the chairman that it would be another 60 days before they released water from Srisailam.

It was in this context that he felt that the residents of Tirupati would have to conserve water and use it with utmost caution.

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