Reservoirs wait for rain, power crisis threatens India

The Met has said the monsoon is 43% below average and India is staring at a drought. The government’s Economic Survey, tabled on July 9, said poor rains could trim food output and push up prices.

Updated on: Jul 13, 2014, 07:32:32 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Water levels in India’s reservoirs have gone down drastically due to poor rains and if the monsoon doesn’t pick up soon, this could lead to a power crisis on a national scale.

The Central Water Commission’s latest report shows water levels in the 85 major reservoirs it monitors have almost halved in one month (June 6-July 10). As of July first week, the 31 hydel projects were generating power at about 35% of their total capacity of 30,000 mega watts. If the water levels go down further, so will power production.

Read: Drought fears loom over north India

Hydropower meets 30% of India’s power demand and a dip here would increase dependence on thermal power plants, which are already facing severe coal-supply constraints. Government data shows 26 thermal power projects have less than four days of coal stocks while another 45 have reserves for about a week.

If the prospect of blackouts wasn’t bad enough, a water commission official pointed to another major problem. The emptying of the reservoirs will reduce irrigation potential — a cushion for farmers during dry spells — while low hydel generation will hamper capacity to pump groundwater to save crops.

The Met has said the monsoon is 43% below average and India is staring at a drought. The government’s Economic Survey, tabled on July 9, said poor rains could trim food output and push up prices.

Read: Why India can't get its monsoon forecast right

“As power demand for agriculture increases, there is more stress on the grid and this can lead to frequent outages. We had a similar situation in the last drought year (2009) when reservoir levels were better than they are now,” the official said.

In just a month, water levels went down to 20% (of the normal storage level) from 48% in Himachal, from 60% to 33% in Rajasthan, from 200% to 76% in Uttarakhand and from 262% to 92% in Madhya Pradesh.

Down south, levels in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh went into negative figures. Normal storage level denotes water in the reservoir during the same period last year.

A senior government official confirmed there was a crisis brewing, saying, “Water levels in these projects, mostly located in south and central India, are currently much below the required level.”

Read: Moonsoon delayed; govt readies contingency plan

Government authorities are said to be keenly monitoring power supply from the northern grid to states such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to prevent a collapse similar to the one in August 2012, which left more than 600 million across north and east India powerless for more than 24 hours.

Long power outages in Delhi and its neighbouring towns and cities have become emblematic of north India’s crushing power shortage.

(Inputs from Anupama Airy)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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