Telugu States Increase Police Security At Dams

In what can become a major escalation of an already-acrimonious and longstanding water feud between the Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, both states have recently increased police security at their respective irrigation projects on the Krishna as tensions over the issue of the utilisation of water from the Srisailam reservoir flare.

Further, nobody apart from employees working at the project sites is being allowed to enter the sites.

Telangana has gone a step further and has even set up check posts at its borders with AP - police personnel have been checking all the vehicles coming into Telangana from the neighbouring state's Macherla region, which lies in Guntur district, reportedly to prevent any law and order flare-ups in the Nagarjuna Sagar project area.

As a result of the beefed-up security arrangements, even officials from AP were recently stopped from visiting the Nagarjuna Sagar dam. They had gone to the area to submit a representation to the officials of the TRS regime, appealing to them to stop all ongoing hydro-power generation activities in the Krishna basin.

Officials of the Pulichintala project, however, were more successful in submitting a similar representation and were able to hand over the same to the TS-GENCO. Pointing out that the Pulichintala reservoir was not even half-full yet, the officials said that Telangana's power generation pursuits were objectionable, and urged the Telangana administration to stall the same.

The AP government meanwhile has also deployed huge numbers of police personnel at its Pulichinthala project. The state police are manning the left canal of the Srisailam dam, and have erected a fence around it.