Bengaluru, 9 August

KPCC Vice President Syed Ahmed Hussain stated on Saturday that Karnataka needs the proposed dam at Mekedatu, as it was “basic arithmetic”.

Hussain was replying to an open letter by actor and activist Chetan Ahimsa and 29 others, who had asked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to intervene and stop Karnataka’s proposed Mekedatu Balancing Reservoir on the Cauvery river, citing environmental damage and the impacts a mega-dam could have on downstream Tamil Nadu. 

“Karnataka contributes 425 TMC of Cauvery inflow against Tamil Nadu's 252 TMC, and holds 42 percent of the basin area against Tamil Nadu's 54 percent,” Hussain replied. “Karnataka generates the larger share of the river's water while receiving the smaller share of its allocation.”

He added that the Mekedatu dam would not change how much water Cauvery water Karnataka releases to Tamil Nadu. 

Hussain argued that Bengaluru’s water needs are well documented.

“The City requires roughly 2,600 million litres daily and falls short by approximately 500 million litres every day, even after combining Cauvery supply and groundwater—a deficit exceeding the entire supply of many mid-sized Indian cities,” he wrote. He said by 2024, “roughly 14,700 borewells had stopped yielding water “and the position has not improved since”. 

Even if rainwater harvesting, treated wastewater reuse and groundwater recharge regulation are optimised, the methods “cannot close a 500 million litre daily gap on their own. Mekedatu is a necessary supplement to those measures, not a substitute for them”, he stated. 

He downplayed the potential environmental degradation by comparing it to other dams, such as the Narmada Sagar project that submerged 40,332 hectares of land, the Sardar Sarovar project that submerged 10,000 hectares of forest land and the Polavaram project in Andhra Pradesh that will submerge over 1 lakh acres of land and displace an estimated 4,00,000 people. 

By contrast, he argued, the total land requirement for the Mekedatu project is pegged at approximately 5,252 hectares, of which roughly 4,996 hectares will be submerged, comprising about 3,182 hectares from the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, 1,870 hectares of reserve forest land and 201 hectares of revenue land. Only five villages will be affected, he claimed.