ONGOLE: The Water Resource Department is making every effort to stop the leakage of water from the Kandula Obula Reddy Gundlakamma Reservoir (KORGR) project where the second crest gate was damaged and a part of it was washed away due to the increased inflows on Friday night.
Project Chief Engineer Muralinadh Reddy, along with SE Abu Talim and other officials, is stationed at the project to supervise the execution of temporary stop-lock arrangement at the damaged gate. “A team of technical experts from Vijayawada arrived today and they are on the job to fix the stop-lock apparatus. Leakage is expected to be stopped by midnight,” he said.
The 3.86 TMC storage capacity KORGR project has about 2.4 TMC water at that time, the second crest gate was washed away, and by Saturday evening, water in the project leaked at a discharge rate of 1,600 cusecs downstream.
The project staff tried to control the leakage and succeeded to some extent to arrange the stop-lock shield on the second crest gate. However, there is still some gap and efforts are on to cover the same. By evening, the discharge rate was brought down to 1,000 cuesecs and to avoid any untoward incidents, people living downstream along the Gundlakamma river were put on alert.
Meanwhile, TDP leaders, along with All India Kisan Sangham district leaders, staged a protest at the KORGR project site and raised slogans demanding immediate action to repair the damaged gates and provide irrigation water to the crops under the KORGR project ayacut.
They also demanded that the government pay adequate compensation to the farmers who incurred loss due to the KORGR project crest gates damage. Addanki MLA Gottipati Ravikumar, Kondepi MLA DSBVA Swamy and former MLA BN Vijyakumar and others visited the project.
“The government has no interest in the welfare of farmers and agriculture sector of the State. The Gundlakamma reservoir project third crest gate was washed away some 20 months back (August - September, 2022) and till date, there is no repairs to that damaged gate and it is evident that the YSRC government is not capable to repair and maintain the irrigation projects of the State,” said Ravi Kumar.
It may mentioned here that the government has recently finalised tenders of crest gate repair works and the works are likely to commence soon. A Rajasthan-based company has got the contract Rs 9.40 crore.
According to a senior official, the firm which has been given the contract for repair and maintenance of the crest gates of the project, will take up the repair works of the second gate also and claim the cost as an additional expenditure later.