HYDERABAD: Telangana Irrigation Engineer-in-Chief C Muralidhar on Wednesday requested the Godavari River Management Board (GRMB) to submit six detailed project reports (DPRs) of Godavari projects to the Central Water Commission (CWC) for according clearances without any further loss of time. He advised the GRMB to not act in such a manner which would become detrimental to the interests of Telangana.
In a letter to the GRMB chairman, Muralidhar said the State had submitted DPRs of Choutpally Hanumanth Reddy LIS, Chanaka-Korata, Chinna Kaleshwaram (Mukteshwar) LIS, Tupakulagudem, Sitarama LIS and Modikuntavagu. He said these projects were all not new to attract the provisions of Section 85(8)(d) of the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014.Muralidhar also stated that these projects were ‘wrongly shown’ as unapproved projects in the gazette notification. Moreover, these projects would not have any negative impact on AP’s projects and its planned utilisation of 518 tmcft.
“All these are ongoing projects since 2010 and were grounded by the then government in erstwhile AP. In order to overcome the defective planning in such ongoing projects, Telangana has undertaken the re-engineering of certain existing and ongoing projects so as to ensure optimum utilisations to the full extent under these projects. It is reiterated that all the ongoing projects, together with the completed projects, are well within the entitled/planned utilisation of 967.94 tmcft as applicable, based on the grounded projects in erstwhile AP state. The erstwhile AP had undertaken these projects within the earmarked utilisation of 967.94 tmcft,” Muralidhar said.
“Since these projects are taken up prior to June, 2014, the GRMB is not mandated to look into aspects such as irrigation planning, cost, cost economics, designs etc, which are to be looked into by CWC as per the existing procedure for the earlier projects. The KRMB did not refer the Rayalaseema project to Telangana. But, GRMB referred the DPRs of Telangana to AP. GRMB and KRMB are taking varying stands as both are formed and mandated to function within the ambit of the AP Reorganisation Act,” Muralidhar wrote. GRMB is not mandated to take a separate stand, as the clearance of DPRs was CWC’s job.