BENGALURU: Vice President CP Radhakrishnan on Saturday said the interests of farmers in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu should remain paramount in decisions concerning the sharing of the Cauvery river water. “The languages the farmers speak do not make any difference,” he said on Saturday in Bengaluru, while attending the commemorative ceremony of Nadaprabhu Kempegowda on his birth anniversary.
“Whether a farmer speaks Tamil or Kannada, the paddy they produce is for the consumption of everyone. The recent opening of the Tungabhadra dam by multiple ministers is a step in the right direction,” he said. “I will see to it that the Kadugolla are recognised as a scheduled tribe. I will take it up with the concerned authorities,” he said.
He continued to assert that Kempegowda never segregated the city in terms of caste. “He planned the city so that industries could get concentrated in feasible locations,” he stressed.
According to Radhakrishnan, Bengaluru’s present position as a livable city owes itself to Kempegowda’s prescience. “Kempegowda had a great vision, of which we are now seeing the benefits. It is unbelievable that he had a vision for this city five centuries ago. He envisioned a city where people of different faiths would live and work together,” he said. “His model of building lakes and planting trees has become a model of sustainable urbanity,” he remarked.
