Nagarjunasagar

Sriparvata, Vijayapuri, Nagarjunakonda-call it by any name but it remains today the modern day Nagarjunasagar, an engineering marvel, largest masonry dam and one of the largest man-made reservoirs.

Nagarjunasagar, a massive irrigation project on the River Krishna, about 150 kms. from Hyderabad, has a rich and interesting past. It was a valley in the Nallamalai range of the Eastern Ghats with civilisations dating back to thousands of years. Recorded history, however, assigns the first signs to the later Satavahanas and subsequently the Ikshvakus in the third century.

Archaeologists assert that the fertile Krishna Valley hummed with life in the third millennium BC, the Neolighic age and then the Megalithic age around 1500 BC.

The tallest masonry dam in the world, Nagarjunasagar stands some 124 metres high, creating the largest man-made lake with a capacity of 11,472 million cubic metres. The water-spread of the reservoir is about 380 sq. km.

The main canals-Jawaharlal (on the right) and Lal Bahadur (on the left) carry water to two regions of the State - parts of Coastal Andhra and Telangana. The canal system under this magnificent hydro-electric project is over 40,000 kms.

cumulatively.Jawaharlal Nehru called Nagarjunasagar a "modern temple". The Sriparvata and Vijayapuri of yore were really temples where the famous savant ad Buddhist disciple Acharya Nagarjuna preached the message of the Buddha.

With a decision being taken to build a dam at the site, large-scale excavations were carried out during the course of a special project to retrieve most of what could be. The special project under the stewardship of R. Subramanyam took six years from 1954 to unearth a cultural sequence from the early stone age to medieval times.