Centre\'s efforts to get irrigation projects remain futile
No state was ready to comply unless their issues and concerns on water allocations, pending and new projects were addressed first
Hyderabad: The Centre's efforts to persuade the Telangana and Andhra Pradesh governments on Tuesday to hand over irrigation projects on the Krishna and Godavari to the respective river management boards — the KRMB and the GRMB — as stated in the gazette notification issued by the Union Jal shakti ministry in June this year, proved futile.
No state was ready to comply unless their issues and concerns on water allocations, pending and new projects were addressed first.
The meeting was convened by Pankaj Kumar, secretary, union ministry of jal shakti through video conference with Chief Secretaries Somesh Kumar of Telangana and Sameeer Sharma of Andhra Pradesh, on the implementation of various provisions of the gazette notification issued on July 15.
The gazette was supposed to come into force from October 14, but there was no headway.
The TS government said there was no need for GRMB as there were no major issues on sharing of Godavari waters and there were no common projects like there were on the Krishna.
The AP government argued that both GRMB and KRBM should be continued as per the gazette and it will not hand over projects on the Krishna unless the TS government hands over projects on the Godavari.
Somesh Kumar said that as per the request of the Union jal shakti minister, the Telangana government had withdrawn its case on Krishna water allocation from the Supreme Court, and asked the Centre to to take immediate action. Pankaj Kumar said the matter is with the law department and would be referred to the Krishna waters tribunal.
The CS said the government had submitted detailed project reports (DPRs) of six projects to the Central Water Commission in September 2021 which are still pending.
Somesh Kumar said five projects in the Godavari Basin — Ramappa-Pakala link project, Kaleswaram project (additional 1 tmc ft per day), Kandakurthi and Gudem lift irrigation schemes adn P.V. Narasimha Rao Kanthanapally barrage — were wrongly included in the unapproved list of projects in gazette notification of GRMB and asked the secretary to delete them.
Pankaj Kumar assured that the Centre would look into the issues raised by the state government on the illegal irrigation projects taken up by AP on the Krishna river.