Reservoirs of northern region lag behind national storage

NEW DELHI: Rains have wreaked havoc in north India — especially in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh — but the current available storage in its major reservoirs in this region lags behind the average national figure of cumulative storage in 91 major reservoirs which are monitored by the Central Water Commission (CWC), a technical arm of the Water Resource Ministry.

The water from Pong Dam reservoir is the lifeline of Sriganganagar and a few other districts of Rajasthan. File photo

Ravi S Singh
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 24

Rains have wreaked havoc in north India — especially in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh — but the current available storage in its major reservoirs in this region lags behind the average national figure of cumulative storage in 91 major reservoirs which are monitored by the Central Water Commission (CWC), a technical arm of the Water Resource Ministry.

The CWC’s latest data says that the storage in the reservoirs in northern region which includes states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, during the current year is less than the corresponding period of last year and is also less than the average storage of last ten years during the corresponding period.

The data pertains to the week ending September 20, 2018.

While Punjab is among the states having equal storage compared to last year for the corresponding period, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan figure among those having lesser storage than last year.

The storage in the southern region, including states of Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and the western region is higher.

The western region, like its northern counterpart, has also lagged behind.

The cumulative live storage capacity of the six reservoirs of northern region is 18.01 BCM. The total storage available in them is 13.87 BCM which is 77 per cent of total live storage capacity.

The storage during corresponding period of last year was 84 per cent and average storage of last ten years during corresponding period was 83 per cent of the total live storage capacity of reservoirs of the northern region.

Nationally, the storage available in 91 reservoirs for the week ending on September 20 was 120.087 which is 74 per cent of their total storage capacity.

The current storage was 123 per cent of the storage of corresponding period of last year and 105 per cent of storage of average of last ten years. This percentage was at 75 per cent for the week ending on September 13.