HYDERABAD: The war of words between the Congress and the TRS, on the proposed Water Grid project, continued on Saturday with the national party firing fresh salvos against panchayat raj minister KT Rama Rao.
Reacting to the minister’s comments made against AICC general secretary Digvijaya Singh and terming Congress party as ‘scam-gress’, TPCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy reprimanded the minister to keep in mind his age and political experience while speaking.
Congress heavyweights Jana Reddy, Shabbir Ali, Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka too launched a barrage of criticism against the minister for making personal remarks against the AICC general secretary.
“Digvijaya Singh is even senior to your father K Chandrasekhar Rao. He played a crucial role in formation of Telangana. It is not good on the part of the minister to make personal remarks,” the TPCC president said.
Continuing with his broadside against the TRS government’s flagship programme, he alleged that the minister had colluded with companies to help them win the tenders for project and in turn received kickbacks.
Terming the Water Grid as ‘scam grid’ and ‘corruption grid’, the Congress leader sought to know from the government why it had closed the tenders within a week for such a major project.
“It appears that tender process was pre-arranged and all bidders sat at one place while process had taken place. Gap between different bids is less than one percent,” he pointed out adding that the project was only meant to get TRS party ‘commissions’.
He also sought to know from the government why had it clubbed, earlier, 14 packages of the project into five packages. He asked why not even one contractor from Telangana had won a bid.
“The Congress party will fight and expose the TRS government by all means including taking a legal route,” he said.
While the Central government survey had already established that 70 per cent of the state was provided with pipelines, he said Rs 10,000 crore would be enough to provide safe drinking water to the people of the state.
He also wanted to know from chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao what prompted the latter to inflate the figure for completion of Water Grid from Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore within months.
Meanwhile, in a separate presser, another Congress leader Jeevan Reddy advised the government not to shift the location of the Pranahitha-Chevella project from Tummidihatti to Kaleshwaram.
The move only imposes additional burden on the state exchequer as it would need additional 500 MW power.
“If shifted to Kaleshwaram the water has to be lifted from 95 meters but at Tummidihatti the water can be lifted from 152 meters,” he observed.