Hyderabad: A blame game between the ruling Congress and the main Opposition Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) over irrigation projects has rocked politics in Telangana, setting the tone for a high-pitch campaign rivalry for the upcoming parliament elections.
The Congress has focussed on major cracks from top to bottom in a couple of tall piers of a barrage of Kaleswaram lift irrigation project on river Godavari at Medigadda in Jaishankar Bhoopalpally district. On the other hand, the BRS has highlighted that the ruling party has compromised the state’s interests by agreeing to handover the Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar dams, common projects located in the territorial jurisdiction of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana respectively on Krishna river, to a river management board of the Central government.
The Centre had set up boards for both rivers to resolve river water disputes between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh as a sequel to the implementation of a bifurcation law related to erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. There are no major inter-state disputes on the Godavari warranting the intervention of its river board but the two states have frequently got into confrontation protesting against excess drawal of water by each state over and above their due share and construction of new outlets, mainly the Rayalaseema lift-irrigation project by AP which was later stayed by the National Green Tribunal.
The sparring between the two parties in the last few weeks escalated to the level of the Congress organising a site visit to Medigadda barrage, nearly 250 kms away from Hyderabad, by its MLAs and that of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) on February 13.
The BRS and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were also invited to make it an all-party delegation but they gave it a miss. Incidentally, the BRS organised a major public meeting on the same day at Nalgonda against injustice sought to be done by the Congress for the Krishna river basin districts of Mahbubnagar, Rangareddy, Nalgonda and Khammam by handing over the projects to the board.
Party president and former chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao made his first public appearance on the occasion after the defeat of BRS in the November 30 elections to the state Assembly. He also did not show up in two Assembly sessions after the polls due to a fracture of his hip bone. He was, however, administered oath as an MLA and Leader of Opposition by the Speaker G. Prasad Kumar in the latter’s chamber on one of the days when the Assembly was not in session.
A large contingent of media corps which was taken to Medigadda by the Congress in buses was shown the vertical cracks in the piers and how one of them sank three feet down in the river bed. A power point presentation highlighting the colossal loss caused to public money was made to chief minister A. Revanth Reddy and a huge gathering by irrigation and vigilance officials of the state government.
Reddy threatened to initiate steps to recover money from wrongdoers under provisions of the Revenue Recovery Act. He regretted that Rs 93,000 crore was already spent on the project though the new irrigable area created was only 98,570 acres.
The presentation of vigilance findings by its Director General Rajeev Ratan highlighted several deviations in project execution, cost escalation and violation of dam safety norms. He said major blocks in the barrage were constructed by a sub-contracting agency and not by L & T which was awarded the contract.
A similar PowerPoint presentation was also made by the Congress government in the Assembly a day ahead of the visit to Medigadda and on February 17 when a white paper on irrigation was released by the government.
Releasing the white paper, irrigation minister N. Uttam Kumar Reddy said yet another barrage of the project at Annaram village had also started leaking the previous day. The National Dam Safety Authority which was requested to inspect the barrage had agreed to depute a team in a couple of days but asked the government to immediately dewater the barrage.
A request by BRS to be allowed to make its own powerpoint presentation on how it stalled handing over projects was turned down by the Speaker on the grounds that there was no such precedent.
The presentations by Congress highlighted that the draft manual to hand over projects to the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB) was approved by the previous BRS government in 2015, a year after the formation of Telangana State. This was confirmed by a letter written by Smita Sabharwal, Secretary, Irrigation, in then chief minister Chandrasekhar Rao’s office, in December last year.
The irrigation minister also tabled in the Assembly a 47-page note about a gazette notification issued by the Centre bringing under the fold of KRMB the irrigation projects, correspondence between the state and Central governments and minutes of an Apex Council meeting presided by Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and attended by Telangana and Andhra Pradesh chief ministers Chandrasekhar Rao and Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy respectively. It was after the Apex Council meeting that the Centre notified the gazette and asked Telangana and AP governments to deposit within sixty days Rs 200 crore each as seed money with the board for operation and maintenance of projects.
The BRS government, therefore, made a provision of Rs 200 crore in the budget last year.
BRS MLA and fomer irrigation minister T. Harish Rao denied that the BRS government had ever agreed to hand over projects to the KRMB. In fact, he said the Jal Shakti Ministry had noted in the minutes of a KRMB meeting after the Congress government was sworn in on December 7 that the state had agreed to the proposal. He claimed that the PowerPoint presentations were full of falsehood. The irrigation secretary in the Congress government Rahul Bojja said the minutes were not recorded correctly and demanded correction.
KCR with his nephew T. Harish Rao. Photo: Facebook/T. Harish Rao
Harish Rao also said the BRS government had always maintained that there was no question of giving up projects until the share of Telangana in Krishna was revised upwards. Against 512 tmc ft and 299 tmc ft of water allotted to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana respectively in 66:34 ratio as per bifurcation law, the BRS government demanded reallocation of water in 50:50 ratio till the operation protocols of projects were fixed. Only if this was conceded, the government agreed to handover projects and thus made a budget allocation of Rs 200 crore.
Rao said the BRS government had addressed 27 letters to the Centre with its demand.
He recalled that the government had filed a case in the Supreme Court praying for reallocation of Krishna water between four riparian States – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and AP – but it was withdrawn at Centre’s intervention when it committed to referring the matter to Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal headed by Justice Brijesh Kumar. The issue has since been referred to the tribunal a couple of months ago but the respective States are yet to submit their pleadings.
As the contentions of the two sides hanged fire, the Congress government passed a resolution in the Assembly refusing to hand over control of common projects to KRMB unless, among others, water sharing between the two States was finalised on the basis of the catchment area, drought-prone area, basin population and cultivable area. The catchment of Krishna in Telangana is 68 per cent but both parties have agreed to a 50:50 share in the total allocation of 811 tmc ft before the separation of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh as a temporary measure, pending the final award of the tribunal.
The BRS welcomed the resolution and claimed it was the party’s victory. The government moved the resolution hurriedly in view of the public meeting of BRS at Nalgonda. But, better late than never, said Harish Rao.
At the public meeting of BRS and site visit by MLAs at Medigadda, the slanging match between Chief Minister Revanth Reddy and his predecessor Chandrasekhar Rao hogged the limelight. Speaking on the Medigadda fiasco for the first time since the incident on October 21, Chandrasekhar Rao said Kaleswaram project was not merely about Medigadda barrage. It was about three barrages, 200 kms of tunnel, 1,500 kms of canal network, nineteen electric sub-stations for pumping water and twenty reservoirs. He made light of sinking of piers at Medigadda saying it happened with some other projects in the past also.
The government meanwhile asked the Engineer-in-Chief of irrigation C. Muralidhar who was on extension of service to tender his resignation. It gave marching orders to another E-n-C N. Venkateswarlu who was in-charge of the Kaleswaram project.
A report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India tabled in the Assembly said the government and a special purpose vehicle formed for the project will require Rs 1.41 lakh crore in the next fourteen years fir debt servicing. The SPV had raised market loans of Rs 87,000 crore till March last year with guarantees by State government.
The AP government wrote a letter to KRMB agreeing to handover it’s control on the two projects subject to Telangana also showing the same gesture. However, Andhra Pradesh on November 30, poll day for Telangana Assembly elections, deployed it’s police force half way down the road overbridge on Nagarjunasagar dam to release water through the canal that serviced the State.
The developments in irrigation sector are likely to have a serious bearing on the coming Parliament elections as the Congress has targeted to win 14 out of 17 seats in the State and the BRS focussed on checking erosion of the party base, particularly the grassroots level elected representatives who are defecting to the Congress in a big way. The BRS representatives have moved no confidence motions against chairpersons of the same party and ensured change of guard after crossing over to Congress in several local bodies.
The sitting MP of BRS representing Peddapalli, N. Venkatesh has also joined the Congress in the presence of it’s president Mallikarjun Kharge at New Delhi.
