Polavaram and Pulichintala - what AP is going to do with Telangana river watershare!
suneetha achyuta
Justice B N Srikrishna Committee
New Delhi
Respected members of the Committee,
The Human Rights Forum (HRF) is a citizens’ forum established with the
objective of working for the protection of constitutionally guaranteed/
internationally recognised rights of the people, and for the right of
the people to propose and strive for new rights not yet recognised in
national or international law. The right to a wholesome and dignified
life is the touchstone for the rights that may be aspired for. HRF is
a self-financed organisation whose members for the most part are from
the professions of teaching, journalism and the law.
HRF is of the view that the demand for a separate State of Telangana
is entirely justified. We will place before you the reasons why we
feel so and we hope our views will find place in your report to the
Government. These observations are based on our involvement and
experience in the human rights movement in the State over the past 30
years.
At the outset we wish to state clearly that the struggle for
Telangana is not merely the struggle of a ‘backward’ region fighting
for development. It is frequently shown that way since the urge to
overcome backwardness and ‘develop’ is seen as a legitimate desire. It
is true that Telangana has remained backward in terms of many of the
usual indicators of development. And it is true that it need not be so
since it is rich in resources of all kinds: river waters, coal,
forests and good soil. The grievance that it has been kept backward by
neglect is therefore widespread. While other aspects of backwardness
can arguably be corrected within a united Andhra Pradesh, Telangana
will never get its fair share of river waters – of the Godavari and
the Krishna - so long as the State is one. One need not endorse all
the conspiracy theories popular with the Telangana movement (as with
any identity movement) to accept this basic fact. Thus there is quite
a rational, unsentimental case for Telangana, for those who don’t like
mixing politics with sentiments. This is not to say that neglect and
discrimination resulting in disparities in the area of employment and
education nor dispossession of other resources are any less important
but the strong aspiration for a just share in river waters does remain
central.
But Telangana is also a distinct social-historical entity around which
an identity has got built over the years. Telugu spoken in Telangana
is distinct and recognisable before one sentence is completed. The
cultural idiom too has a distinction of its own. From the time of the
formation of the State of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 by merging the Telugu
speaking areas of the old Madras State with the Telugu speaking areas
of the erstwhile Hyderabad State, there has been a sizable public
opinion in Telangana that has viewed the notion of one-ness of the
Telugu people with skepticism. To this day the common people of
Telangana routinely refer to the coastal areas as ‘Andhra’, an
appellation used outside the State to refer to the entire State. Socio-
cultural domination by those from the “coastal districts” combined
with economic exploitation is a rallying cry. It is pertinent that the
ongoing movement for a separate State of Telangana is often
articulated not merely as a battle for territory but in terms of a
struggle to preserve a language, a culture. There is truth therefore,
in the argument of those seeking a separate State that Telangana is
not merely a geographical entity but a society with a distinct socio-
historical foundation around which a manifest identity has been
built.
The demand for separate Statehood to Telangana is not a new one and
the history leading up to it is by now well known but some aspects may
be touched upon briefly. The Mulki movement of the 1890s which sought
to protect jobs for locals rather than those from north India gave
oxygen to the desire to safeguard Telangana’s identity and this
consolidated over a period of time. The Mulki movement was not just
about safeguarding jobs but a reaction to the contempt and looking
down of the local culture and Urdu language by those who had come from
Lucknow. There were struggles seeking implementation of the Mulki
norms as well. There were also efforts by organisations like the
Telangana Andhra Janasabha and Telangana Andhra Mahasabha to safeguard
the Telugu language and culture during the dictatorial Nizam rule.
For all these historical reasons there was a strong feeling post-
independence that a united State would be a hindrance to Telangana
aspirations. The States Reorganisation Commission set up by the
government, which took into account the apprehensions of the people of
Telangana, was also not in favour of merging Telangana with the then
Andhra State.
It is worth quoting from the report of the SRC:
“... It will be in the interest of Andhra as well as Telangana if, for
the present, the Telangana area is constituted into a separate State
which may be known as the Hyderabad State, with provision for its
unification with Andhra after the general elections likely to be held
in or about 1961, if by two-thirds majority the legislature of the
residuary Hyderabad State expresses itself in favour of such
unification”. …“Andhra and Telangana have common interests and we hope
these interests will tend to bring the people closer to each other.
If, however, our hopes for the development of the environment and
conditions congenial to the unification of the areas do not
materialize and if public sentiment in Telangana crystallizes itself
against the unification of the two States, Telangana will have to
continue as a separate unit”. “One of the principal causes of
opposition to Visalandhra also seems to be the apprehensions felt by
the educationally backward people of Telangana that they may be
swamped and exploited by the more advanced people of the Coastal
areas...The real fear of the people of Telangana is that if they join
Andhra they will be unequally placed in relation to the people of
Andhra and in this partnership the major partner will derive all the
advantages immediately while Telangana itself may be converted into a
colony by the enterprising Andhras”.
The then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was also not in favour of
merging Telangana with Andhra and was quoted at the time as having
said that the demand for Visalandhra “is an idea bearing a tint of
expansionist imperialism”.
However, the merger took place and the State of Andhra Pradesh was
formed on 1st November 1956. The people of Telangana never tire of
pointing out that this merger was not unconditional. It was premised
and facilitated by a number of promises, not once but several times
and all of them very solemn, as well as constitutional safeguards for
the people of Telangana. Fair play was invoked in the form of the
Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1956, but post-merger not a single assurance
was honoured. Because of this plain duplicity, in due course, the
domination of Telangana by the developed districts of coastal AP got
well entrenched. Not a single safeguard for Telangana within an
integrated State of Andhra Pradesh was honoured.
There was a deliberately callous and systematic decimation of the
Gentlemen’s Agreement that might have held together all the Telugu-
speaking people in one State had it been honoured. To be blind to
historical reality and oblivious of a thoroughly just demand by
continuing to talk of a united State would amount to legitimising the
hegemony of a developed region over an underdeveloped one.
It is true that there are extremely backward areas in all other parts
of the State that have been victims of neglect. But it has to be kept
in mind that Telangana has had a diversion of resources that
legitimately belong to it for the development of other regions.
Diversion of river waters is a telling example. As stated above, there
is a very strong feeling that justice can never be done within a
united State in the matter of a rightful share in river waters for
Telangana. This is not a rhetorical conclusion. Examples of the
Pulichinthala and Polavaram projects, on the Krishna and Godavari
rivers respectively will help throw light on the contention.
Telangana as well as Rayalaseema have among the lowest rainfall
figures in the entire country, unlike coastal and north Andhra Pradesh
which has more than average rainfall. However, much of the Krishna
river water used by Andhra Pradesh goes to the coastal districts of
Krishna, Guntur and Prakasam.
There is of course an unequal historical advantage. The Krishna was
dammed by the British in mid-nineteenth century, at a time when there
was neither a legal nor a political compulsion to inquire about the
needs and views of upstream people (whether of Karnataka, Telangana or
Rayalaseema). Thus began the unequal distribution of the Krishna
waters in favour of the coast and to the detriment of the needs of the
interior. As the areas which received irrigation first developed
faster and acquired further capacity to get more irrigation, the
disparity had a natural tendency to widen. The rational core of the
seemingly ‘emotional’ demand for a separate State of Telangana is
often an effort for a fair distribution of river waters.
Pulichintala is symptomatic of the attitude that the separate
Telangana movement has been complaining about over the decades. The
issue involved is not merely that much more than half of the
submergence will be in Nalgonda district (in Telangana) whereas the
benefit will go to Krishna district (Coastal district). That is bad
enough, considering the economic disparity between the two districts.
But the real issue is the brazenness with which the meager allocable
water left in the Krishna river is being harnessed for the benefit of
an area that has already benefited disproportionately from that
river.
Andhra Pradesh was allotted 800 tmc.ft of water from the Krishna river
by the Bachawat Tribunal, as against 695 to Karnataka and 565 to
Maharashtra. Of this 800 tmc.ft, projects located in Coastal Andhra
were reserved 377.44 tmc.ft of water, those in Telangana 266.86 tmc.ft
and those in Rayalaseema 122.70 tmc.ft. The disproportionate quota
that Andhra Pradesh got was in fact due to the disproportionate quota
that the Coastal districts of the State got. And yet it is that area
which has the highest rainfall precipitation and best groundwater
levels in the entire basin of the river Krishna, from its origin in
the Western Ghats to its delta abutting the Bay of Bengal.
Small wonder then that not only the States of Karnataka and
Maharashtra but the people of Telangana and Rayalaseema as well have
always nursed a fully justified grievance about the distribution of
the Krishna river waters. And even though there is no allocable water
left in the Krishna river in terms of the Bachawat award, proposals
aimed at watering the parched lands of Nalgonda, Mahbubnagar (in
Telangana), Kurnool, Cuddapah and Anantapur (in Rayalaseema) districts
have been put forward in abundance. And the State government too, at
various points of time – if only at election time in most cases - has
promised execution of each of these proposals. Not counting the minor
proposals, the major ones alone would need about 200 tmc.ft of water:
40 each for the Srisailam Left Bank Canal (Nalgonda district), Bheema,
Nettempadu, Kalwakurthi and other lift irrigation schemes (Mahbubnagar
district), Galeru-Nagari and Handri-Neeva (for the four Rayalaseema
districts), and Veligonda (the uplands of Markapuram division of
Prakasam district). The profusion of the demands reflects the stark
reality of heart-breaking drought in these areas.
While not one cubic foot of water has been allotted to any of these
schemes, though foundation stones have been profusely laid for each of
them, often more than once, as Chief Ministers come and go, work is
going ahead with the Pulichintala project, despite protests emanating
from Telangana. Brazen is the only word one can think of for
describing this attitude.
According to a note circulated by the Irrigation department in the
year 1998, the Pulichintala project is slated to use 982 million cubic
meters of water from the Krishna river, which comes to about 13
tmc.ft. One tmc.ft of water is sufficient to irrigate 6,000 to 10,000
acres, depending on whether it is used for wet cultivation or
`irrigated dry’ cultivation. Taking the latter, these 13 tmc.ft of
water would irrigate 1.3 lakh acres of land. One need only imagine how
happy would any of the above districts from Nalgonda to Anantapur be
to get at least this much irrigation water, though it is nothing
compared to the 20 lakh acres that would be irrigated by all the
projects all of them taken together have been dreaming of for decades
now!
And what use is the Pulichintala project going to be put to? Not even
to irrigate 1.3 lakh acres of as yet unirrigated land in Krishna
district, but to ensure that transplantation of paddy in the Krishna
delta under the old canal system takes place in June-July. Almatti in
Karnataka and increased ayacut under Nagarjunasagar in upland Guntur
and Nalgonda districts are said to have slowed down the arrival of
water into the Prakasam barrage in the early monsoon weeks, thereby
rendering transplantation of paddy in the months of June and July
uncertain, and therefore 13 tmc.ft of water will be stored in the
balancing reservoir at Pulichintala to be sent down to the Prakasam
barrage at the appointed time so that the schedule of transplantation
that the delta farmers are accustomed to is not upset! To then speak
of the “great oneness of the Telugu people” in the face of such plain
duplicity is adding insult to injustice. And injustice in the matter
of such a basic life-requirement as water does lead to and has led to
intense discontent and anger in Telangana.
So also with Polavaram on the Godavari river. There are any number of
reasons to reject this huge project which like all big dams around the
country, is a national folly. The country has heard a lot about the
Sardar Sarovar dam because of the tenacious agitation of the adivasis
and other marginalised communities who are displaced by that monstrous
project. It is yet to hear much about Polavaram because the agitation
against it is for the moment splintered and weak. But in fact the
project will be a massive displacer of people – about half of them
adivasis – and is even less justified than the Sardar Sarovar because
that project at least has the argument in its justification that it is
intended to water drought-prone areas. Polavaram has no such defence.
It is intended to water the middle-lands (not even the uplands) of
Krishna, West Godavari and East Godavari districts, which no one would
within reason describe as water-starved areas, and to provide drinking
water to far away Visakhapatnam, which has its own untapped local
water sources.
As a matter of fact, there is a very strong suspicion that Polavaram
is not meant for watering fields at all, but for the water
requirements of a “coastal corridor” running along the State’s entire
coast as well as many other water-guzzling “developmental projects”
including multi-product special economic zones.
It is true that Polavaram too purportedly has its beneficent object:
80 tmcft of water is supposed to be diverted to the Krishna basin to
irrigate the drought-prone areas of Telangana and Rayalaseema. Though
the former Chief Minister YS Rajasekhar Reddy was fond of mentioning
only Rayalaseema in this context, if at all any water is diverted from
the Godavari basin to the Krishna basin, it will have to be shared by
the Krishna basin districts of both Telangana and Rayalaseema. But
firstly, this 80 tmcft is hardly one-fourth of the 335 tmcft destined
to be utilised through Polavaram. Secondly, under the Bachawat award,
in any diversion of water from the Godavari basin to the Krishna basin
by Andhra Pradesh, the upper riparian States of Karnataka and
Maharashtra are entitled to stake claim for a share of the diverted
water. Of the 80 tmcft to be diverted through Polavaram, they will
take 35 tmcft and Andhra Pradesh will get only 45 tmcft. This is
hardly one-eighth of the water to be utilised through Polavaram. That
cannot by any logic justify the huge dam and the massive devastation
it will cause to the adivasis and other poor who inhabit the area of
submergence, once again most of it in Telangana.
The devastation that the project will entail is by no means small.
Villages to be submerged (government figures say the displaced
population is going to be about 2,69,000 living in 286 villages (a few
of them in Chhattisgarh and Orissa but overwhelmingly in A.P) are
located in nine mandals, seven of which are in Khammam district in
Telangana. All of them are located in the Scheduled area. Why should
people in such large numbers, that too principally adivasis and
dalits, be subjected to huge deprivation for the greater development
of developed areas? Or uninterrupted supply of water to Special
Economic Zones & Industrial Corridors?
Significantly, Polavaram does great injustice to Telangana also
because it diverts substantial quantities of water away from the
Godavari basin districts of the region. Medak, Nizamabad, Adilabad,
Karimnagar, Warangal and Khammam are the six North Telangana districts
located in the Godavari basin. These districts posses substantial rain-
scarce areas which can only be served by water from the Godavari
river. Devadula, Ichampalli, Yellampalli, Dummugudem and Sriramsagar
Flood Flow Project are the main projects proposed on the Godavari
river to serve this area.
But if 335 tmcft of water is taken away through Polavaram and 120
tmcft more is diverted to the Krishna basin through the Dummugudem
project, the Godavari basin areas of Telangana would have only about
225 to 250 tmcft for all the above projects. The proper course of
action would be to allocate necessary quantities of water to these
projects before thinking of any other use.
The proper course as far as the Godavari river water is concerned
would be to allocate sufficient quantities of water to the projects
meant to serve the Godavari basin Telangana districts, decide how much
should fairly be diverted to the Krishna basin and arrange for that by
lift schemes, devise lift irrigation schemes to irrigate the lands of
the Scheduled tribes of East Godavari, West Godavari and Khammam
districts living on either side of the river (the very lands which are
to be inundated by the Polavaram Project), and let the rest go into
the sea to complete the hydrological cycle. But a “united Andhra” is
hell-bent on going ahead with the project in its present disastrous
form riding roughshod over objections from democratic public opinion
both within Telangana and outside.
These are but a few instances of the profoundly undemocratic manner in
which Telangana is being served in a “united State”. The ongoing
movement seeking separate Statehood for Telangana is a struggle
against discrimination, against exploitation, against injustice. It is
a battle to reclaim what rightfully belongs to the people of the
region. Whatever their occasional positions on the Statehood issue,
clearly dictated by political expediency whose hallmark has been a
total lack of principle, political parties across the spectrum
acknowledge that the movement for a separate Telangana State is a
genuinely broad-based and popular upsurge.
Human Rights Forum is of the firm view that both for compelling
rational reasons – in particular a fair share of river waters – and
the desire not to let the Telangana identity get submerged in a
hegemonic Telugu-ness, the desire for a separate State is fully
justified.
Sd/
S Jeevan Kumar
(President)
VS Krishna
(General Secretary)
Dt: 9-4-2010, Hyderabad
Phone nos: Jeevan Kumar: 9848986286, VS Krishna: 9440411899
Manohar N
Hi Sunita,
Can u pl send the HRF report as an attachment?
Thanks
Manohar
> Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:02:37 -0700
> Subject: Polavaram and Pulichintala - what AP is going to do with Telangana river watershare!
> From: suneet...@gmail.com
> To: tracking-...@googlegroups.com
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suneetha achyuta
A.Suneetha
Fellow and Coordinator
Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies
2-2-18/49 Durgabai Deshmukh Colony
Hyderabad 500 013
Phone: +91 40 27423690
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Shashi Kumar Reddy Arjula
Thanks & Regards,
Shashi K Reddy Arjula PMP®
Founder President
Telangana Academy of Excellence (Associate NGO of TDF Global)
Mobile: +91 99 66 66 72 99
Mobile: +91 97421 02506
EMail:Shashi...@telanganaacademy.org
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It is possible, Our Telangana Development, if only if we join hands for it. - Arjula