All party delegation: Siddaramaiah resents PM Modi's silence, to write second letter requesting time
Siddaramaiah on Sunday said he will write a second letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his time for an all-party delegation to discuss Cauvery and other river water issues, complaining that the PM has not responded to his first letter even after a month.
The BJP, the CM told the media in Kalaburagi, had 25 MPs, but none of them would open their mouth before the PM on subjects related to water. Karnataka, Siddaramaiah said, was crippled by a bad drought.
Siddaramaiah and his Tamil Nadu counterpart MK Stalin, though aligned politically, have been at each other’s neck on the Cauvery issue.
Karnataka is battling a new crisis after the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) on September 12 directed the state to release 5000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu for 15 days from September 13 morning. Cusec is a unit of flow equal to one cubic foot per second.
Karnataka was helpless because it needed about 103 tmc ft for its own needs including 30 tmc ft for drinking water, 70 tmc ft for standing crops and another 3 tmc for industries.
But the four Cauvery basin reservoirs have a cumulative storage of only 53 tmc ft, Siddaramaiah said.
On Saturday, Stalin attacked Karnataka saying its letter to Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekawat contained wrong information about Tamil Nadu including the charge that the state had increased its area under irrigation. The state, he had said, would insist that Karnataka release 12,500 cusecs.
Siddaramaiah dismissed the BJP leader BS Yediyurappa’s charges that his government continued to release water despite its public posture to the contrary as “politically motivated.”
In a normal year, the state was required to release 177.25 tmc ft of water to TN.
