Krishna Raja Sagara, also known as KRS and, locally, as Kannambadi Katte, is a lake and the dam that forms it. Both sit near the settlement of Krishna Raja Sagara in the Indian State of Karnataka. The gravity dam, built of surki mortar, stands just below where the river Kaveri meets its tributaries Hemavati and Lakshmana Tirtha, in Mandya district.
Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, Maharaja of Mysore, sanctioned the dam's construction during a period of famine, when the state treasury was already under strain, and it was named after him. Getting the dam built, and agreeing on the terms under which it could be built, took decades of negotiation between the Kingdom of Mysore and the Madras Presidency over rights to the Kaveri's water. In a modified form, that dispute still runs between the successor states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu today. An ornamental garden, Brindavan Gardens, adjoins the dam.
Background Mysore, and Mandya in particular, had always been dry country, and summers regularly pushed people to migrate to wetter areas nearby. A severe drought in 1875–76 killed off a fifth of the population of the Kingdom of Mysore, and crop failures kept recurring for want of irrigation water. The Kaveri was the obvious candidate to change that. An earlier attempt already existed as a model: the Marikanive project, begun in 1897 under Diwan K. Seshadri Iyer and Queen-Regent Kempananjammanni Devi, had shown that the state could fund and build a reservoir of its own.
But any major new works on the Kaveri needed the consent of the downstream Madras Presidency, under an agreement signed in 1892 (see below), and getting that consent turned out to be the real obstacle standing between Mysore and its dam.
Survey and plan Mysore's first chief engineer for the project, Captain Dawes, drowned in the Kaveri in 1909 while surveying the proposed site near Kannambadi village. The Diwan at the time, T. Ananda Rao, then brought in Sir M. Visvesvaraya as Chief Engineer and Secretary to the Government; Visvesvaraya took up the post on 15 November 1909. Drawing on his earlier work surveying large dams, including the Aswan Dam in Egypt, and on reservoir designs he'd done in the Bombay Presidency and Hyderabad, Visvesvaraya drew up the design for the Kannambadi reservoir. He ran into resistance from Mysore's own finance ministry, who argued the project would "serve no purpose" and that any electricity it generated would go largely unused for lack of demand. He took his case to Ananda Rao and to the Maharaja, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV. Even so, sanction wasn't immediate. In his own memoir, Visvesvaraya recalled that once his project report was ready, "no sanction was forthcoming from His Highness the Maharaja for some time," and that some of the State's own officers had likely talked the Maharaja out of committing so large a sum, ₹253 lakh by his own estimate, on a single project when the State had never spent anything like it before. Frustrated at his inability to move the Maharaja, Visvesvaraya considered resigning from Mysore service altogether, and went off on leave to Northern India rather than push the matter further. It was the Maharaja himself who brought him back: noticing Visvesvaraya's changed mood, he sent for him while camping in Bangalore, asked why he'd lost his enthusiasm for new works, and, on hearing the engineer's frank answer, told him simply, "Don't be hasty, I will do what you want." Within the week, meeting Visvesvaraya again at Mysore, the Maharaja sanctioned every proposal that had been submitted, the reservoir scheme chief among them, without changing a single detail. The order to begin was issued on 11 October 1911, with a sum of 81 lakh set aside for it (this later rose to about 1.03 crore).
Visvesvaraya's own account of the original design, submitted as his first project report on 5 May 1911, gives figures a little different from the ones the dam was eventually built to, since further negotiation with Madras (described below) would later revise them: a masonry dam 124 feet high and 8,600 feet long, 130 feet above the riverbed and 140 feet above the lowest foundation, with a base 111 feet wide at foundation level, built to hold about 48,000 million cubic feet of water. He calculated the catchment above the dam site at 4,100 square miles, with an average annual flow through the river gorge of around 220,000 million cubic feet. The reservoir was meant to eventually irrigate 150,000 acres and generate about 80,000 horsepower, well beyond the roughly 13,000 horsepower Mysore's existing Shivanasamudra station could produce at the time, of which 11,000 went to the Kolar Gold Fields alone. In that same 1911 report, he laid out why he thought the project was worth the risk: "Once commenced, the scheme opens up a vista of possibilities of ever-increasing value to the State... a work like this would be justified even if it paid no more than 3 per cent. But the promise of extraordinary direct returns from power at commencement, and the opportunity it affords of building up a great irrigation project from the sale proceeds of power, form a combination of advantages rarely vouchsafed to such undertakings in any part of the world."
Visvesvaraya's promotion to Diwan, and his successor as Chief Engineer Ananda Rao served as Diwan of Mysore from 1909 to 1912. When his term ended, Visvesvaraya moved up from Chief Engineer to become the 19th Diwan, a post he held until 1918. That left the Chief Engineer's chair empty, right in the middle of the still-unresolved Kaveri Reservoir Project. Visvesvaraya's choice to fill it was Karpur Srinivasa Rao, at the time a Superintending Engineer in the Bombay Presidency's Public Works Department and an old colleague of his there. A contemporary account puts the succession plainly: "when Sir M. Visweswarayya was made Dewan, Karpur Srinivasa Rao was appointed Chief Engineer in Mysore." Srinivasa Rao took charge as Chief Engineer in November 1912. His appointment was formally gazetted the following year, in Mysore Gazette Notification No. 412 (July 1913), which named him Chief Engineer of the Mysore State. The government's own official history of the Mysore PWD records that the appointment came "at the instance of the Dewan, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, for the execution of the Kaveri Reservoir Project." The two men went on working together as Diwan and Chief Engineer through the Griffin arbitration and the construction years that followed. When Visvesvaraya pushed to have the Kannambadi dam's budget raised at a 1913–14 conference of the Mysore Representative Assembly, it was Srinivasa Rao, as the kingdom's chief engineer, who supplied the figures behind that push.
Visvesvaraya's genuine, signed assessment of Srinivasa Rao does survive, in the latter's Promotion Recommendation Roll for the year ending 31 December 1913. As Dewan, Visvesvaraya wrote in his own hand that Srinivasa Rao "is an experienced officer and his professional ability is of a high order," that he "is hardworking, takes a keen interest in his work and bears a high character," and that "the Durbar are quite satisfied with the manner in which he performed the duties of Chief Engineer and Secretary to Government during the year."
The Madras Presidency objected to the scale of the project. It had its own plans for a much larger dam at Mettur, and it refused to consent to the reservoir Mysore initially proposed: about 41.5 TMC ft, held behind a dam roughly 194 feet high. Referred to the Government of India, Mysore ended up with permission for a far smaller first stage of about 11 TMC ft. Construction went ahead anyway on foundations built for the larger design, which reopened Madras's objections and pushed both sides toward arbitration. Visvesvaraya described the decision in his own words: Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, gave Mysore permission to proceed, but only for a first stage 80 feet high; "we nevertheless started building the dam with the bottom width required for the full height we had originally designed, namely, 124 feet... we took the risk," he wrote, and credited the goodwill of Hardinge and of Sir Hugh Daly, the British Resident in Mysore, with helping Mysore through the dispute. The Government of India appointed H. D. Griffin, a judge of the Allahabad High Court, to arbitrate. Proceedings in what became known as the Kannambadi Arbitration Case opened in July 1913, and Griffin's award, delivered on 12 May 1914, let Mysore build the dam to its full designed height of 124 feet, holding roughly 41.5 to 44.8 TMC ft.
It was in this same period — his appointment, per the Mysore PWD's own official history, came "at the instance of the Dewan, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, for the execution of the Kaveri Reservoir Project" — that Karpur Srinivasa Rao became Chief Engineer of Mysore State, holding the post from November 1912 to June 1917. Srinivasa Rao's own Promotion Recommendation Roll, kept at the Karnataka State Archives, records that he was placed on special duty from 8 July to 18 August 1913, and again from 20 October 1913, "to represent the Mysore Government before the Court of Arbitration appointed by the Government of India" — that is, the Griffin arbitration just described — in the dispute between Mysore and Madras over the Kaveri. The arbitration didn't fully settle things, and after he retired in 1923 Srinivasa Rao was pulled back in, leading the Mysore technical team, alongside Chief Engineer Cadambi, through further talks with Madras officials at Fort St. George between 1921 and 1924. Those talks fed directly into the 1924 Agreement. A separate biographical sketch credits him, too, with "conducting important negotiations with the Madras Government" over the dam. He stayed on to run the department through the years the dam's foundations and lower courses went up, including the wartime cement shortage described below.
Funding: the royal family's personal contribution Popular and heritage-tourism accounts often repeat a story that members of the Mysore royal family sold their own jewelry to help pay for the dam when state finances came under pressure, though the sources don't agree on exactly who did it. Several credit Maharani Kempananjammani, the queen-regent, who by the time construction began in 1911 had already stepped down from the regency but remained an influential figure at court. A 2025 news report quotes a Mysore royal-family member attributing the sale jointly to "the Maharaja's mother Rajmata Kempa Nanjammanni and his wife Pratap Kumari," prompted by the finance ministry's objections to the project's cost. Yet another heritage account credits the Maharaja himself with selling jewelry from the royal treasury to cover a shortfall.
Cauvery water-sharing agreements The dam's construction, its height, and how it's operated have all been shaped by a long sequence of agreements, and later tribunal and court rulings, between Mysore (later Karnataka) and Madras (later Tamil Nadu).
1892 Agreement Signed between the Madras Presidency and the Kingdom of Mysore. It established that Mysore, as the upstream state, needed Madras's consent before it could undertake any major new irrigation works on the Kaveri.
1913–1914 Griffin Arbitration As described above, H. D. Griffin's award of 12 May 1914 let Mysore build the KRS dam to its full planned height and capacity, over Madras's continuing objections.
1924 Agreement A more thorough, fifty-year agreement between Mysore and Madras. It formally permitted construction of the KRS dam, by this point largely built, alongside the Madras government's Mettur dam, and it laid out detailed water-sharing and irrigated-acreage terms for both sides. A supplementary agreement in 1929 pinned down the exact quantities of water to be released to Madras.
Karpur Srinivasa Rao's role in the 1924 negotiations