Moving Kaleshwaram project from original location has shot up cost by three times: Expert

Hyderabad: After CAG recently termed the Rs 1.2 crore Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Scheme (KLIS) as economically unviable, adviser to Minister of Jal Shakti and Chairman of The Task Force on Interlinking of Rivers, Sriram Vedire, on Thursday said moving to Medigadda from the originally proposed location Tummadihatti has shot up the project cost by three times.

A few days ago, Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy during a discussion on a white paper on the irrigation sector, said despite caution and objections from irrigation experts and engineers, the then chief minister, K Chandrshekar Rao went ahead with Medigadda at the location.

“In 2015, BRS government lied in saying that the Central Water Commission (CWC) has mentioned that 165 TMC of water is not available at Tummadihatti and only 67 TMC is available at this location. CWC never said that. CWC always mentioned that 165 TMC is available at this location. BRS government wrongly mentioned that only 67 TMC is available at Tummadihatti location only to show it as a reason to move to Medigadda location,” Sriram Vedire told reporters on Thursday.

He added that the BRS government has shown two reasons for disagreement of Maharashtra for 152 Full Reservoir Level (FRL) and only 67 TMC of water availability at Tummadihatti as the reasons to shift the project to Medigadda.

“Thus, with both its inability to convince Maharashtra for 152 FRL and also by lying that only 67 TMC is available, they re-engineered the project and changed the location to Medigadda. By spending another 30,000 crore, the state would have utilised 165 TMC of water to irrigate about 16.4 lakh acres, that too mostly by gravity thereby saving about 10,500 crore operational cost every year on power component to lift waters which we are forced to spend from Medigadda location. Also, the increase in new command area from the project at Medigadda is less than two lakh acres as compared to Tummadihatti, which was 16.4 lakh acres,” he added.

He further said CWC only approved the hydrology -water availability and interstate aspects like inter-state issues. CWC did not approve the designs and investment clearances. As per the “Guidelines for submission, appraisal and acceptance of irrigation and multipurpose projects, 2017”, when there is a Central Design Organisation (CDO) in any state, CWC will not look into the designs.

“The CDO of the Irrigation Department of Telangana state has prepared the designs of the Kaleshwaram Project. So, it is the state CDO that is responsible for the designs and not CWC. Investment clearance was also not given by CWC, as the state did not answer the queries raised by CWC. So, it is very clear that any design flaws are of the CDO, Telangana and not of CWC,” Sriram said.