Agroeconomist K. Palaniswami groped for answers to the questions on the worksheets filed by the Telangana Government and the topography of Andhra Pradesh, at the Brijesh Kumar Tribunal (Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal) hearing held in New Delhi on Friday.
Mr. Palaniswami also admitted that he did not “apply the correction factor” to compute the evapotranspiration values of lands in Andhra Pradesh. When asked by senior A.P. counsel A.K. Ganguli if he had applied the “correction factor,” the witness said he did not do so as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) manual said that “nearby solar radiation data” was sufficient to compute the evapotranspiration values.
Inconsistencies galore
There appeared to be many inconsistencies in the answers given by the Telangana witness on the third day of the hearing.
When asked to identify the worksheets in Annexure X containing the “detailed computation sheets of evapotranspiration,” the witness said he had prepared the worksheets but could not remember when he gave them to the government officials. When the senior counsel asked the witness crucial questions about the topography such as how deep inland Khammam was, the witness said he was “not sure.”
All the calculations in the worksheets were based on the longitude, latitude and altitude provided in the logs of the India Meteorology Department (IMD), the witness said. Explaining why he had not applied the “correction factor” to compute the values, he said the FAO manual stipulated that the correction factor was not necessary if the “next available data series” was used to compute the values if data from the required area was not available.