Meagre water inflows may affect paddy cultivation

Farmers are a worried lot. Poor rainfall in the Krishna-Pennar basin has severely impacted paddy cultivation in the Krishna delta region.

Agriculture in this region depends heavily on the release of water from the Narayanpur dam built on the Krishna river in Karnataka. All added up over twenty lakh acres of paddy under cultivation is likely to get seriously impacted, unless catchment areas in Maharashtra and Karnataka do not receive sufficient rain.
To make matters worse, storage levels in Srisailam have fallen and this is a matter of grave concern for farmers in the Godavari and Krishna districts, as also those from Prakasam and Guntur.  Better inflows would bring water into canals and also raise the groundwater levels helping borewells function more effectively. Officials are hoping that inflows from the Tungabhadra into the Sriramsagar Canal and K.C. canal would improve over the next few days.
Meanwhile, farmers who depend mainly on paddy cultivation for their livelihood are concerned about the dipping water inflows into the Krishna delta area especially since time is running out.