Telangana Presses Centre and Neighbours for Its Fair Share of Tungabhadra Waters

Telangana has renewed its push for a bigger share of water from the Tungabhadra project, with Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy raising the long-pending dispute directly with his counterparts in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and with the Union Jal Shakti Minister.

At a meeting held in Hospet, Karnataka, Revanth Reddy argued that Telangana is entitled to 15.9 TMC of water from the Tungabhadra system but has in practice been receiving only 5 to 6 TMC in recent years, a shortfall that state officials say is hurting both farmers and drinking water supplies in the state’s northern districts. The gap, according to Telangana’s irrigation department, has widened as upstream projects in Karnataka have expanded their own draw from the river, leaving less water flowing down to Telangana’s share points by the time seasonal allocations are calculated.

The Tungabhadra dispute is one of several interstate river-sharing quarrels that have simmered across the Krishna and Godavari basins since Telangana’s creation in 2014, when the state inherited a share of undivided Andhra Pradesh’s water entitlements without a fully updated tribunal award to match. Successive Telangana governments have argued that the state’s allocation was fixed using outdated assumptions about cropping patterns and drinking water needs that no longer reflect the state’s growing urban population, particularly around Hyderabad and its satellite towns.

Officials in the state’s irrigation department say resolving the Tungabhadra shortfall is urgent ahead of the kharif season, when farmers in districts bordering Karnataka depend on canal releases timed to the monsoon. A delay or reduction in supply at that stage can force farmers to either delay sowing or fall back on groundwater, adding to the burden on already stressed aquifers in the region.

The Centre has not yet announced a fresh allocation formula, and Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh have their own competing claims on the same river system. For now, Revanth Reddy’s government says it will keep pressing the issue at the Union level, framing it as a question of fairness for a state that, officials argue, has waited too long for its water rights to be settled on updated terms.