Water for Every Field and Home

The water question was not simply an agricultural matter. It was existential. Entire districts of Telangana, Mahbubnagar, Nalgonda, Adilabad, had watched their farmers commit suicide year after year, driven to desperation by crops that failed because water never came. Children in Nalgonda drank fluoride-contaminated groundwater because no surface water infrastructure had ever been built for them. Villages in Mahbubnagar had no drinking water at all. The rivers ran full and the people went thirsty. When KCR's government took office, it set about answering this grievance with a scale of ambition that the country had not seen before.

Three programmes defined the water transformation: Mission Bhagiratha, which brought drinking water to every household; Mission Kakatiya, which restored the ancient tank network that had been allowed to collapse; and the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project, which lifted the Godavari itself to the fields of thirteen districts that had never known assured irrigation. Together they represent the most comprehensive water infrastructure investment in the history of any Indian state.

Mission Bhagiratha: Water at Every Doorstep

The fluorosis crisis in Nalgonda had been documented for decades. Children were growing up with deformed bones because the only water available was contaminated with fluoride from the ground. In Mahbubnagar, women walked kilometres every day to fetch water from sources that were neither safe nor reliable. Mission Bhagiratha was designed to end this, permanently, by drawing water from the surface rivers Krishna and Godavari and treating and piping it to every home. The project was commissioned within three years of commencement, a timeline that infrastructure experts described as remarkable for a programme of this scale.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi made special mention of Mission Bhagiratha in his Mann Ki Baat on 22 May 2016, applauding the Telangana government's efforts in the drinking water sector. NITI Aayog, the 15th Finance Commission and governments of Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Odisha all acknowledged Mission Bhagiratha as a model to emulate. The Central Government launched its own Har Ghar Jal scheme directly inspired by Mission Bhagiratha, extending the same commitment to tap water for every household across the country.

Mission Kakatiya: Restoring Seven Centuries of Inheritance

The decision to name the programme after the Kakatiyas was deliberate. It connected the new government's work to the greatest irrigation legacy in Telugu history and framed the restoration as a continuation of what had been interrupted in 1956, not a new programme but the resumption of something ancient. Farmers who had watched their fields dry up over five decades saw their tanks filled again. The groundwater table rose across the state as the surface storage was restored.

Kaleshwaram: Lifting the Godavari to the Sky

The scale of Kaleshwaram is difficult to comprehend in ordinary terms. Its total power demand is 4,959 megawatts. Its total storage capacity is 141 TMC. The three barrages, named Lakshmi, Saraswathi and Parvathi, impound the Godavari at different points and feed the lift system that carries the water uphill through a network of tunnels and reservoirs until it reaches the fields of Karimnagar, Nizamabad, Medak, Nalgonda and the other districts that had been denied irrigation for six decades. An inter-state agreement with Maharashtra, completed in the same period, secured the water allocation that made the project possible.

All Lift Irrigation Projects: The Complete Picture

Kaleshwaram was the largest but not the only major irrigation project commissioned under the Telangana government. Across the state, six major lift irrigation schemes were commissioned and two more brought to advanced stages of completion, together catering to 51 lakh acres of farmland.

What the Water Did

The clearest measure of what the water programmes achieved is what happened to agriculture in Telangana between 2014 and 2022. Paddy cultivation area increased by 180 percent. Paddy production increased by 342 percent. Gross irrigated area across all crops increased by 117 percent. Telangana, which had contributed only a fraction of national paddy procurement before 2014, became the second largest paddy producing state in India after Punjab, procuring 13 percent of the country's total paddy in 2021-22.