Hyderabad: The BRS on Saturday described the White Paper on irrigation released by the state government in the Assembly as one that was full of errors and had deviated from truths, adding that there was no consistency in the information provided in the document.
Party MLA and former irrigation minister T. Harish Rao, who spoke for BRS in the discussion on the White Paper, said it was full of falsehoods adding that the government was launching a new smear campaign against his party, ignoring all the work the BRS government had done to improve irrigation and how it made the state the country’s granary.
The White Paper, he said, was a ‘false paper’ and said that unlike the claims in the document, the reality was different. For instance, on the issue of Rayalaseema lift irrigation scheme in Andhra Pradesh, he said that they had objected to it in January 2020 way before the AP government issued orders calling for tenders for the project in May that year.
He said it was only after it was established that the Pranahita-Chevella project, as envisaged by the then Congress government was not possible to be built, that it was re-engineered and Kaleshwaram lift irrigation scheme was taken up. Even the Central Water Commission said that the Pranahita project will not have the projected water availability.
Hitting back at the Congress government, Harish Rao said that the government was trying to mislead the House and the people on the Kaleshwaram project. On the CAG report on Kaleshwaram, he said Congress talking about it was nothing more than scoring a self-goal.
“In the past, N. Chandrababu Naidu had said that the CAG reports are unscientific. Later, Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy said that CAG has no authority to question government policies, while the then Congress chief minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy said CAG reports were not Bible, Quran or the Gita. Even former prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh had said that CAG reports were full of mistakes and have no real basis,” Harish Rao said.
The Congress government, he said, should be the one that will have to apologise to the people of Telangana for not keeping its promises and spreading falsehoods and not the BRS as was being demanded by the Congress.
