History of Polavaram Project

Polavaram Project is a multi-purpose irrigation project across the Godavari River Andhra Pradesh,in India.
National River-Linking Project, which works under the aegis of the Indian Ministry of Water Resources, was designed to overcome the deficit in water in the country. As a part of this plan, surplus water from the Himalayan rivers is to be transferred to the peninsular rivers of India. This exercise, with a combined network of 30 river-links and a total length of 14,900 kilometres (9,300 mi) at an estimated cost of US$120 billion (in 1999), would be the largest ever infrastructure project in the world. In this project's case, the Godavari River basinis considered as a surplus one, while the Krishna River basin is considered to be a deficit one As of 2008, 644 tmcft of underutilized water from Godavari River flowed into the Bay of Bengal. Based on the estimated water requirements in 2025, the Study recommended that sizable surplus water was to be transferred from the Godavari River basin to the Krishna River basin.

History

In July 1941, the first conceptual proposal for the project came from the erstwhile Madras Presidency. Later Diwan Bahadur L. Venkata Krishna Iyer, then chief engineer in the Presidency's irrigation department, made the first survey of the project site and made a definitive proposal for a reservoir at Polavaram. Sri Iyer not only visioned cultivation of 350,000 acres (140,000 ha) over two crop seasons through this project, but also planned for a 40 megawatt hydroelectric plant within the project. The entire project was estimated to cost about 6.5 crore(s) (US$1.2 million). The old final designs  of Polavaram dam was planned at full reservoir level (FRL) 208 ft MSL with 836 tmcft gross storage capacity and 150 MW hydroelectric plant. By 1946-47, the estimated cost rose to 129 crore. It was christened as Ramapada Sagar Project since the backwaters of the reservoir would touch the Lord Rama temple at Bhadrachalam. The project presently under construction is scaled down to FRL 150 ft MSL. The project cost estimate in 2004 stood at 8,621 crore.