The State’s largest dam, Mettur, has about 23 thousand million cubic ft (tmcft) however that is hardly sufficient for the authorities to take care of sustained launch of water to farmers, past every week, within the Cauvery delta.
| Photograph Credit score: E. LAKSHMI NARAYANAN
Tamil Nadu could also be in for a spell of water disaster and decrease rice manufacturing this time, if the present Northeast monsoon doesn’t come to its rescue.
As of now, the combination storage within the main 15 irrigation reservoirs is a couple of third of the mixed capability of the reservoirs. Within the corresponding interval final 12 months, the state of affairs was utterly completely different with the mixed storage being round 92%.
The State’s largest dam, Mettur, has about 23 thousand million cubic ft (tmcft) however that is hardly sufficient for the authorities to take care of sustained launch of water to farmers, past every week, within the Cauvery delta.
The rainfall through the Northeast monsoon has been reasonable because the State has obtained round 240 mm of rainfall towards the anticipated 236 mm. It ought to get not less than 260 mm extra to be thought-about comfy, probably the most of which ought to materialise in November. Ordinarily, December yields solely about 20% of the full rainfall of the monsoon.
In truth, the prevailing sample of rainfall registered by the State thus far through the season seems to be extra in tune with the forecast made by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural College (TNAU), which, in late September, predicted that the State would get 438 mm throughout all the monsoon towards the traditional 434 mm, a deviation of 1 per cent. The Meteorological division, in its outlook at the start of October for the season, referred to the southern peninsular area of the nation usually and said that the anticipated rainfall “ is more than likely to be regular (88-112%) of the Lengthy Interval Common (LPA).”
The TNAU, which was extra particular in its forecast than the Meteorological division, had anticipated solely a traditional rainfall for the core districts of the Cauvery delta – Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam and Mayiladuthurai. Regardless of the water availability at Mettur not being comfy and the expectation of a subdued rainfall, farmers have gone in for elevating paddy through the samba-thaladi cultivation season to the tune of round 3.62 lakh hectares. Of this, almost 50% falls underneath “direct sown“ class of cultivation, which signifies that seeds are immediately sown as an alternative of transplantation. This methodology is adopted in occasions of water scarcity.
However, the issue with water availability appears to be larger within the remaining areas of the State, a mirrored image of which will be seen in the way in which the farmers have taken to paddy this time. The paddy protection within the non-delta areas of the State is about 1.3 lakh hectares shorter than what it was final 12 months. As in contrast to the earlier 12 months’s share (39%) of direct sowing within the total paddy protection, this time the tactic’s share is about 57%. In 2025-26, rice manufacturing within the State was 77.5 lakh tonnes, about one lakh tonnes decrease than the earlier excessive of 79.07 lakh tonnes throughout 2021-22.
As a part of its efforts for defending the crop within the Cauvery delta, the State authorities, at conferences of the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) and the Cauvery Water Administration Authority (CWMA) on Friday, demanded that Karnataka launch round 20. 7 tmcft together with the backlog of about 16.9 tmc ft. Nonetheless, the Authority ratified the choice of the Committee, which had really useful that Karnataka launch 3.88 tmcft to Tamil Nadu by way of 3,000 cubic ft per second (cusecs) per day for 15 days from Saturday (November 7, 2026).
Printed – November 08, 2026 12:52 am IST