Mandya/Mysuru, Aug 10: Reeling under what they call the "drought of the century", farmers in Mandya and neighbouring districts are set to make a desperate plea to the state government: make the districts of the Cauvery basin part of Tamil Nadu to which Karnataka is forced to release Cauvery water. Demanding freedom from the "perennial apathy" of successive state governments, the Mandya district unit of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha will submit a petition to chief minister Siddaramaiah on August 15, which will be observed as a black day in Mandya with a massive black flag protest.
The irony in the farmers' rather dramatic demand is hard to miss: barely months ago, they burned effigies of politicians and blocked roads to protest the release of water to Tamil Nadu. G Made Gowda, 90, once the face of the water agitation in the region and now accused of politicking, says "Farmers are dying. We've never seen this kind of a drought in this region."
Tied down by the Cauvery water dispute and Bengaluru's water needs, the government has not released a single drop from the KRS dam to these districts since November last year.
Farmers said they understood the government's predicament and had not demanded water all these days as the inflow into KRS was low at about 4,000 cusecs. But with the inflow having crossed 10,000 cusecs in the past two days and the dam level touching 90ft, there was no reason for the government to withhold water, they said.
At the same time,it granted TN 419 tmc ft of the total 740 tmc ft water in the Cauvery basin, while Karnataka gets 270 tmc ft. "I think the only entity our government is scared of is the Supreme Court. So, if Tamil Nadu gets water, we want to be part of that state," said K S Sudheer Kumar, the Mandya district president of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, the vanguard of farmers' movement in the state for decades.
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