The Mahaweli Authority has asked farmers to rely on rainwater as far as possible when preparing paddy land for the Maha season, and to use irrigation water only for sowing, NewsFirst reported.
Director General H. M. J. K. Herath urged growers to manage water carefully in view of prevailing El Niño conditions.
The release schedule is already running
The Authority has issued the water release schedule for the 2026/2027 Maha season. Releases began on 1 October and will be carried out in stages to 55 Mahaweli schemes until 14 November.
The schemes cover 227,283 hectares of paddy and other cultivated land.
The request is therefore not a restriction on supply but an instruction on sequencing: land preparation — the water-hungry stage of puddling and levelling — is to draw on rain where it falls, so that the scheduled releases are available at sowing.
Why the Authority is being cautious
The appeal lands against a forecast that has worsened. The World Meteorological Organization now expects El Niño to intensify and persist until February 2027, a period that covers the whole of the Maha season — a finding carried on Thursday by both the Daily Mirror and Hiru News.
Conditions are not uniform across the island. The Irrigation Department said on Thursday that four major reservoirs and one medium-scale reservoir were spilling or had spill gates opened, including Ambewela and Kande Ela in Badulla, according to the Daily Mirror. Highland catchments taking rain while the dry zone is asked to conserve is a familiar pattern in an El Niño year.
Maha is the main cultivation season, and this one has been shaped by the drought that ran through the middle of the year. Earlier coverage tracked the decision on the Maha water issue date and the Rs. 30,000 fertiliser subsidy set for the season.
Not reported
The filing gives no current storage figure for the Mahaweli reservoir system, no breakdown of the staged release by scheme, and no estimate of the area expected to be cultivated this Maha against the 227,283 hectares commanded. No corroborating account of the schedule appeared on another verified newsroom at the time of writing.
