HYDERABAD: The ambitious project of the state government to provide drinking water to every household across the state will hereafter be officially called the Telangana State Drinking Water Project.
It will be executed by Telangana Drinking Water Supply Corporation Limited. For its execution, the government has decided to fill 620 posts of engineers in the panchayat raj department through the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC).
Heretofore the project has been called the water grid. Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Tuesday named it as Telangana State Drinking Water Project at a meeting he held with ministers KT Rama Rao and T Harish Rao, and officials of various departments at the Secretariat here on Tuesday.
Rao told the officials that the project, which was envisaged to meet the drinking water need people for the next 15 years, should be able to meet the need for the next 30 years. “The Project should be a role model for other states,” he said.
Rao said rural water supply (RWS) officials should take the responsibility of laying pipelines to each and every household. He wanted officials to select pipes of international standards.
“The pipeline manufacturing company’s past record should be taken into consideration before selecting it,” he said and asked irrigation officials to cooperate with the officials in allocating water and also construction of intake wells.
Stating that the central government was likely to introduce a new law with respect to usage of forest lands for development purpose, Rao said the state government was ready to give one lakh acres of land as compensation to the forest department for the land it would take for the water project.
Officials informed the chief minister that there were three places where railway tracks crossed the path in the process of diversion of water to Hyderabad from river Godavari. Rao spoke to SCR general manager Srivastava immediately over phone and asked him to look into the issue, a CMO press release said.
Earlier in the day, panchayat raj minister KT Rama Rao held a meeting with officials and said that funding agencies like JICA were coming forward to fund the project.