Vijayawada: The government’s expenditure on rain guns to save the crops in Rayalaseema districts hasn’t yielded the desired results. The state has claimed that it saved standing crops in 226,170 acres in 75 mandals of Rayalaseema districts under dry spell mitigation programme in the month of August. It has spent nearly Rs 300 crore on this exercise and got nothing out of it.
Contrary to the statistics provided by the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), a government-constituted committee has decided to declare 63 mandals in Anantapur (whole district), 53 in Chittoor, 36 in Kurnool and 32 in Kadapa districts as drought-affected mandals in Kharif-2016. Now, the Opposition has started demanding that the government explain where the technology ex-pertise has gone and why rain guns usage didn’t yield anticipated results.
The state government has taken the services of 1,239 students of JNTU, Anantapur, Sri Venkateswara University and Padmavati Mahila University and Rayalaseema University for this purpose. Even, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, while camping in Anantapur to monitor the dry spell mitigation programme, visited Veerapuram village of Gunnagutta mandal of Rayadurgam constituency of Anantapur district to personally inspect the use of rain guns and interacted with farmers, in the last week of August.
Lambasting the Chief Minister on this, PCC chief N. Raghuveera Reddy has questioned the government’s release of statistics related to expenditure on this “Victory over Drought” (VOD) programme. Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, the PCC chief said that he had visited Ganapathipalli village of Parigi mandal in Anant-apur district, where he was told by the farmers that 140 empty water tankers had come, along with the Chief Minister’s VOD programme.
However, not a single acre in the district got relief through VOD. The PCC chief wanted the government to show where the rain guns were kept. “The farmers in Rayalaseema district were given 6 lakh sprinklers during the Congress rule,” he claimed.
