In U-turn, KCR says use Medigadda to store water

Hyderabad: Former chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao on Tuesday sprang a surprise by demanding that the state government impound and lift Godavari waters using the Kaleshwaram lift irrigation scheme (KLIS), including the damaged Medigadda barrage, part of which sank in October last year.

Rao, who had claimed credit for designing and executing a world engineering marvel in the scheme, broke his silence for the first time on the mishap while speaking at the public meeting in Nalgonda. The meeting, seen as a bid to stage a comeback after the BRS defeat in the recent Assembly polls, was held in protest against the alleged move of the state government to hand over common projects on the Krishna river to the Krishna River Management Board.

The BRS supremo’s demand to lift Godavari water through the KLIS came a few months after the BRS government hurriedly emptied the Medigadda barrage, fearing that the part of it that sank might get washed away altogether. Water was also released from the other two barrages — Annaram and Sundilla — as engineers found cracks in their structure and because the soil condition and design were the same for all three barrages.

Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy, who visited Medigadda with a multi-party delegation of legislators, hit back at his predecessor, stating that the project would get washed away if water was impounded in the three barrages.

Speaking at the public meeting, Rao expressed concern over the Godavari waters going downstream without being put to use. “Even now, we receive four to five thousand cusecs of water in the Godavari. How can they leave Medigadda defunct,” he asked.

Further, he said the cofferdam built recently to prevent water flow into the damaged section would be sufficient to divert the river, and the rest of the system could be put to effective use.

The former chief minister also sought to maintain that Medigadda was just one component of the KLIS project with numerous storage, pumping and distribution facilities. “After all, one or two piers sank,” he said, adding that the Congress government had done a great injustice to farmers by depriving them of water from the scheme to settle political scores with him.