Developing Operation Procedures for Individual Reservoirs in a Large Multistate River Basin in Context of Tribunal Awards

Abstract

The uncertain nature of monsoon and the high temporal and spatial variability of rainfall in India make it imperative to utilize the available water resources optimally and efficiently. Reservoirs are one of the most effective means of matching the temporal and spatial availability of water with demands. In India, the state governments are considered custodians of the water in their respective states. Sometimes, water-sharing disputes arise in large river basins that are shared by multiple states. A mechanism to resolve such disputes is through tribunals, which allocate the basin waters to different states and projects in accordance with their past and projected demands, water availability at different dependability levels, and other constraints. In such basins, the operation of individual projects/reservoirs, so as to follow all the stipulations of the tribunal, is a challenging task. In this paper, a methodology has been framed to develop the operation procedure for individual projects so as to honor the tribunal awards. The Krishna River basin in India has been used as an example case study. The proposed procedure keeps track of the total inflows received, the total water used, and the balance utilizations to be made at each project, each state, and the whole river basin in real time. Using this procedure, the percent utilization achieved by different sharing states of the Krishna basin, especially in deficit years, is quite close to the values specified by the tribunal. The developed methodology is quite general and can be applied to any river basin with suitable modifications.