Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy is expected to visit Medigadda to inspect the damage. He is also taking stock of other projects.
File photo of the Kaleshwaram project. (Supplied)
The new Congress government in Telangana has got cracking with its to-do list. It has announced that it would soon order an inquiry into the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme (KLIS), touted as the world’s largest in its class of projects.
The Congress, in the run-up to the recent Assembly elections in the state, used irregularities in the execution of the Kaleshwaram Project as ammunition to attack the then BRS government.
Congress top leader Rahul Gandhi and A Revanth Reddy, who was only the TPCC president then, visited the Medigadda Project, part Kaleshwaram, on 2 November, after one of its piers had sunk.
Later Revanth Reddy said that KCR had killed the project and now the project would kill KCR. The party workers even set up mock ATMs at the election rallies to discredit the BRS government.
After coming to power, the Congress government does not seem to leave bygones be bygones. Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Monday, 11 December, said that the new Congress government in the state would order an inquiry into the “irregularities” in the KLIS.
After a review of the status of the irrigation projects with officials at Jala Soudha in Hyderabad, the minister said: “Apart from getting down to the bottom of the several irregularities in the execution of the KLIS, including sinking of the piers of Medigadda reservoir, which is part of Kaleshwaram, the state government will take up with the Centre the early resolution of the state’s share of Krishna waters.”
He said that there had to be total transparency in irrigation projects as people’s money funded them. That was the reason the current government was keen on ordering an inquiry into the construction of the KLIS.
Taking a serious view of the Medigadda fiasco, in which newly-constructed piers sunk into the ground, he asked the department to organise a visit to the project for him along with the officials concerned as well as the representatives of the private company sub-contracted for the construction of the project.
He also sought details from the department about how much money had been spent on the project, how much ayacut had been created, and how much was being spent on the supply of water for each acre.
The officials reportedly apprised the minister that one pier of the Medigadda project had sunk to a depth of 1.2 metres and that the money spent on the project was about ₹4,600 crore.
The sinking of the pier had apparently had a cascading impact on three more piers, said the officials.
They told him that the project was emptied following the sinking of the pier, which lessened the pressure on the other piers.
The minister said that he would review the status of each project separately with officials. He also reviewed the status of the Palamuru Rangareddy and Seetharama Lift irrigation schemes with them.
He said he favoured a third-party check on the quality of the irrigation projects being constructed in the state, so as to gain the confidence of the people.
The minister also said that the government would accord priority to the protection of about 40,000 lakes and tanks in the state.
He said he would discuss the Srisailam Left Bank Canal works with the chief minister and see that they were completed at the earliest, no matter what the expenditure.
“We will discuss the proposal in the state Cabinet and will have it cleared at the earliest,” he said.
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