Sometime in the 16th century, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, the founder of the city of Bhagnagar (present day Hyderabad), prayed: “Mera shahar logaan se maamur kar, rakhyaa jun tun daryaa mein min yaa sami” (“Fill my city with people, as you would, a river with fish”). 

His prayers were answered (for better or for worse). The metaphor of a river was significant, so also the fish (the metro city), constantly needing water.

In 2009, I wrote an opinion article for the New Indian Express, titled 'River Water Holds the Key', saying that “the Godavari river, in no small way, will decide the future of a state, and if another is formed, the future of the river itself…At stake are crores of rupees invested in irrigation projects, SEZs, hydel power projects and thereby, real estate activity in and around Hyderabad…”

Did something change?

Seventy-nine per cent of Godavari river’s and 68% of Krishna river’s catchment area lies in Telangana. Other important rivers in the region include Bhima, Dindi, Kinnerasani, Manjeera, Manair, Penganga, Pranahita, Peddavagu and Taliperu. The Pranahita river is a confluence of the Wainganga and Penganga, connecting it to political Maharashtra. The drainage basin – which is now part of the political discourse – has an estimated annual discharge of 280 TMC (thousand million cubic feet), coursing through forests and wildlife sanctuaries.

However, it is not the river or water per se but rather how it is imagined that determines the course of this region's political and economic history. As to who imagines the river, or lives with her/it, or is rendered broken on account of it all, it also makes a difference to the discourse. However, rarely, if ever, do you find them – the broken – at centre stage. A purely anthropocentric river discourse, and critiques along the same line, cannot suffice. It is desirable to be mindful of the ecology or environment in relation to the rivers, roadways and highways.

However, it is also possible perhaps, from stray (but freak) movements of the non-human actors/persons, who remind us of their vulnerability amidst the mightier river and roadways' engineering ambitions.

When leaders of states assume the image of water providers within mainstream anthropocentric religious mythologies that imagine humans as lording over nature, paradoxically akin to the scientific modernity discourse, they ignore the larger mission of rivers, seasonality, or the natural rhythm regulating the ebbs and flows of river systems and aquatic life. In the present logic of continuous water supply through the year for cities, towns, and fields, a two-dimensional landscape with vertical housing structures and a different kind of universal history of cities is being imposed. And at the end of the spectrum, you have the ‘Smart City’ concept, which necessitates continuous electricity, water, urban mobility, and seamless IT connectivity through optic fibre networks.

As for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, from the arrival of rivers and their ‘stay' in the rightful season to backwater floods in Kaleshwaram and coffer-dam flooding in Polavaram, inundating newer spaces for longer periods, political floods are here to stay. Too much money has flowed under those canals, and roads, by now, and that money is also powering the course of our politics.

Also read: In Spite of Mega Projects, Water Is Scarce in Rural Telangana

Water, ego, power  

Culturally speaking, though Telangana has come a long way in terms of reclaiming its sense of pride in terms of identity, be it in the celebrations of the local Ganga-Jamuni Hyderabadi tehzeeb, or festivals such as Bathukamma or Bonalu – the former is intrinsically linked to the cheruvus, lakes, tanks, and in terms of the centrality of the Telangana language – the power language – in Telugu mainstream cinema.

However, the Telangana movement expressed other hopes as well. Discussions had revolved around alternate, or smaller, technologies of river water utilisation, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity with regard to the big dam (Polavaram) ideas, which the then Andhra-based political leadership was supposed to be championing.

Public discourses regularly raised these concerns. For instance, 'in terms of the gravity flow in [united] Andhra Pradesh, the irrigated land is approximately 69 lakh acres, out of which 60 lakh acres are in the Andhra region.'

'In Telangana, what are the projects under gravity flow, barring the Sriram Sagar project? That too, under Phase I, which was meant to provide water for 9.68 lakh acres; it is not feeding more than 4.5 lakh acres under kharif for just a single crop.'

'The Krishna river flows over the heart and body of Palamur, but does not reach the parched throats of the Palamur people.'

The Krishna and Tungabhadra just remain rivers; what is left for Mahbubnagar, except tears?

'There is a conspiracy to take Godavari waters to Krishna through [Nagarjuna] Sagar, through Srisailam and Pothirreddypadu project.'

People had anticipated that the new state would implement smaller projects and address these disparities. Some of those discussions possibly led to the K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) government’s projects, such as Mission Kakatiya, Mission Bhagiratha, and Pranahita-Chevella-turned-Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project (KLIP). However, opposition parties have levelled massive corruption allegations against KLIP.

Today, the super-ambitious Kaleshwaram project is to the KCR regime what the super-ambitious Polavaram was to the Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy's regime of pre-Telangana.

The invocation of the Vedic-Sanskritic mythological sage, Bhagiratha, remains unchanged from the times of YSR (Jalayagam). The necessarily male figures who have ruled the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have never tired of employing this metaphor of 'bringing water' to the people.

The KLIP manages to lift the Godavari water to a height of 618 metres from its source to the Kondapochamma Sagar reservoir in Gajwel district, 227 kilometres away. It comprises three barrages, 19 reservoirs, 22 pump houses, a 204 km underground tunnel, a 9 km pumping main, seven links, 28 packages, through 13 districts, utilising a canal network of more than 1,800 km to produce a total of 240 TMC water, of which 169 TMC is used for irrigation, 30 TMC for the Hyderabad urban municipal water supply, 16 TMC for miscellaneous industrial uses, and the remaining for evaporation loss. Out of the total 240 TMC of water, 195 TMC comes from Medigadda Barrage, 20 TMC from the Sripada Yellampalli project, and 25 TMC from groundwater.

The KLIP has four pumping facilities at Ramadugu, Medaram, Annaram, and Sundilla.

Incidentally, 15,200 acres of the ayacut and nine villages in Siddipet district, which is KCR’s constituency and where his sprawling farm is located, are expected to benefit from Package 10 of the Kaleshwaram's Link IV.

The pillars 19, 20, and 21 of the Medigadda barrage have developed cracks with sinking sand beds due to heavy downpours in October this year.

Activists emphasise that the governing authorities failed to conduct a comprehensive study of the vulnerable dynamics within the Godavari-Pranahita sub-basin and neglected dam safety analysis. Additionally, critics argue that the project is financially burdensome, with an estimated cost of Rs 50,000 per acre for cultivating paddy – an expense expected to be borne by future water consumers.

As multiple projects, including dams, barrages, and lifts are planned along the Godavari river between Maharashtra and Telangana, a new question emerges: Will there be a sufficient volume of water, as initially projected for storage at the downstream Polavaram project, considering potential changes in climate regimes in the future?

The non-Anthropos

On February 24, 2018, The Hindu reported on the loss of forest cover to an extent of over 7,800 acres on account of the KLIP.

The daily reported that officially, 22 lakh forest trees were to be hacked for the same. The unofficial count could be more. Citing the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) conducted by the EPTRI, the report said that forest land in nine divisions of Mahadevpur, Sircilla, Siddipet, Yadadri, Medak, Nizamabad, Banswada and Nirmal came under the project. At least 391 plant species, six of which were in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) vulnerable species list, would also be impacted due to the project, besides butterflies and moths (26), dragonflies, birds (75), reptiles (11), amphibians (five), mammals (16), spiders (five).

Initially, the NGT, too, had invalidated the environment clearance given to the Kaleshwaram project, based on a petition filed in 2018, saying that the Telangana (TRS) government had changed the project design by adding Mission Bhagiratha (drinking water supply from Krishna and Godavari to rural and urban Telangana) to it. However, as with the Polavaram dam, this too, passed muster.

In December 2019, a sub-adult male tiger named T1-C1, aged three, covered a distance of 1,300 km from Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary in Yavatmal. (Some reports suggest distances of 1,500 or even 1,700 km.) This journey spanned the political boundaries of Maharashtra and Telangana, traversing not only six (or possibly eight) administrative districts but also four designated wildlife sanctuaries in these states. The details were extensively covered in reports from TOI, ENS, and other reputable sources.

He traversed through Adilabad in Telangana and then to Painganga Sanctuary, leading few wildlife experts to raise concerns about deforestation, shrinking habitat, and scarcity of food. Over the last few years, tiger movements have often been reported along the Maharashtra-Telangana border, some leading to animal-human conflict, as well. Reports of tigers searching for a new territory need further probe.

Last year, a migration of a tiger from Thadoba Reserve in Maharashtra to Kagaznagar in Telangana was reported.

Tigers are known to cross the Pranahita river and enter the Adilabad district after crossing the Penganga. Two years ago, conservationists also noted the movement of tigers from Maharashtra to Chennur and Mahadevpur, incidentally, closer to the Kaleshwaram project.

At one of the public meetings at Warangal in 2010, a writer shared a page from history, which seemed poetic: 3,000 years ago, the Buddha cleansed his feet in the Godavari river after crossing Adilabad near Kotilingalu. T1-C1, too, perhaps, was searching for this kind of peaceful metaphor in his (and by extension, our collective) survival story, outside of electoral gains.

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