Sudheer, K P^1,2,*, S. Murty Bhallamudi^1,3, Balaji Narasimhan^1,3, Jobin Thomas¹, Bindhu, V M¹, Vamsikrishna Vema^1,4, Cicily Kurian¹,
¹Department of civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai – 600036,
²Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
³Indo German Centre for Sustainability, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai – 600036
^*Corresponding Author: sudheer@iitm.ac.in

The authors of Sudheer et al. (2019) – hereinafter referred to as ‘authors’ – appreciate Mr. J. Harsha (hereinafter referred to as ‘commenter’) for his judgmental assessment (in his blog appeared on SANDRP website- “https://sandrp.in” on August 25, 2020, see: https://sandrp.in/2020/08/25/role-of-dams-in-kerala-floods-distortion-of-science/) of the authors’ work “Role of dams on the floods of August 2018 in Periyar River Basin, Kerala” (published in the Current Science in 2019: [DOI: 10.18520/cs/v116/i5/780-794]). As mentioned in Sudheer et al. (2019), the primary objective of the article was to examine whether the early release of the water stored in the reservoirs would have attenuated the flood peaks, and if so, what would have been the extent of the attenuation, in the context of debates and discussions in the social, political, as well as scientific domains based on non-sequitur speculations. Accordingly, the authors designed a scientific exercise using a widely used hydrological model (HEC-HMS) to understand the role of the dams in the Periyar River Basin (PRB) in the 2018 flooding situation.