Bengaluru, July 27: While the regular monsoon season is slowly drawing towards its end, Karnataka is staring at one of the worst ever droughts in the recent past.
While the reservoirs in the Cauvery basin have recorded the lowest storage of water in the last six years, the Krishna basin is breathing through water from Maharashtra, which is facing a flood like situation in the Krishna basin.
Among the Cauvery basin reservoirs, only Harangi dam has storage of 7.5 tmc ft of water, against its full capacity of 8 tmc ft of water. World famous KRS dam has only 17.13 tmc ft of water as against its full capacity of 49.45 tmc ft. Last year towards July last week, KRS had storage of 48.06 tmc ft water. The story of other two reservoirs -- Kabini and Hemavathi are also no different.
The main reason for poor inflow is attributed to poor monsoon in Kodagu (-45%), Mysore (-58%), Chikkamagaluru (-42%), Hassan (-33%) and Mandya (-27%).
Rainfall is also scanty in the districts that contribute to reservoirs in the Krishna basin, resulting in poor water storage in Bhadra, Tungabhadra, Ghataprabha, Malaprabha and Narayanapura reservoirs. However, heavy rainfall in Maharashtra has helped storage in Alamatti dam. to an extent. The water storage in Tungabhadra dam has fallen to 29.47 tmc ft as against its full capacity of 105,79 tmc ft.
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Meanwhile, the agricultural activities in Northern Karnataka have come to a standstill. The districts like Bidar, Kalaburgi, Raichur, Koppal have not received more than a couple of showers. The farmers, who had initiated agricultural activities had to stop it as even the borewells started drying up.
Consequently, the farmers have started mass migration in search of jobs to other parts of the State. While the farmers from Vijayapura district have started migrating to districts like Shivamogga, Chikmagalur and Bengaluru, the farmers from Raichur and Koppal are migrating towards Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune.
Meanwhile, Chief Minister D K Shivakumar has convened the meeting of all MPs from the State in New Delhi to appraise them about the drought. Speaking to reporters he said that he would be appealing to the MPs, cutting across the party lines to be united in the Parliament and raise the concerns of drought in the State.
Shivakumar also said that he would be convening an all party meeting soon in Bengaluru to discuss the drought situation.
