Kaleshwaram: Pranahita-Chevella project again under consideration
Kaleshwaram: Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Friday said the Pranahita-Chevella project envisaged by the previous Congress regime will be reconsidered for its implementation. A ministerial group comprising D Sridhar Babu, Kommatreddy Venkata Reddy, Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy and Ponnam Prabhakar visited the Medigadda Barrage as part of the balancing mission.
Speaking to reporters at the scene, he said the government was seriously concerned about the structural problems being faced by the revenue generation plan by enhancing Kaleshwaram. The cause for concern is the increasing financial burden on the public exchequer due to the huge investment in the project.
The Pranahita Chevella project would have been a much more viable option than KLIS. As part of the plan, it proposed a dam at Tammidihati to divert water from the Pranahita River, a tributary of the Godavari, at an estimated cost of Rs 38,000 million. But the proposal was shelved due to political reasons. Immediately after reaching Hyderabad, Pranahita Chevella’s proposal was presented to the Minister Principal. Its implementation will be considered to meet the irrigation and drinking water needs of the population of the area.
The minister pointed out that due to cost overruns, the state will have to spend more than Rs 150,000 million on KLIS, even though its estimated cost is Rs 80,400 million. The net yield of the project since launch was only 50 TMC. The lofty statements regarding the results of the project were far from reality. This is a pure waste of public money on a large scale. In an apparent reference to the Engineer-in-Chief, C. Muralidhar, the Minister said: “As a custodian of public funds, he should have opted to take the license when the project was not implemented as per his wish.”
Questioning the need to implement the expansion phase with the aim of collecting one TMC more per day under KLIS when the first phase itself was not fruitful, he said challans worth more than Rs 8,000 million have not yet been finalized. The total processing of challans in the Revenue Department reached Rs 9,000 million.
