Polavaram Project

Polavaram Project is a multi-purpose irrigation project which has been accorded national project status by the union government. This dam across the Godavari River is under construction located in West Godavari District and East Godavari District in Andhra Pradesh state and its reservoir spreads in parts of Chhattisgarh and Odisha States also.PurposeNational 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 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 basin is considered as a surplus one, while the Krishna River basin is considered to be a deficit one. As of 2008, 644 tmcft of underutilised water from Godavari River flowed into the Bay of Bengal. But as of 2017 over 3000 tmcft are drained unutilised into Bay of Bengal. Based on the estimated water requirements in 2025, the Study recommended that sizeable surplus water was to be transferred from the Godavari River basin to the Krishna River basin.