HYDERABAD: Three barrages — Medigadda, Annaram and Sundilla — under the Kaleshwaram lift irrigaiton scheme (KLIS) were damaged even during the 2019 floods and the previous BRS government clandestinely adjusted the Rs 500 crore estimated value of repairs into the revised project cost as the contractors refused to bear the expenditure.
In November 2019, after the floods, it was found that the RCC wearing coat, CC curtain walls, CC blocks and apron in the downstream of the barrages were washed away. The government had then spent Rs 180 crore to fix the damage Rs 83 crore at Medigadda, Rs 65 crore at Annaram and Rs 32 crore at Sundilla — and estimated that repairs would cost Rs 500 crore.
According to the draft performance report of the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) on KLIS, which the BRS government kept under wraps, studies by the irrigation department had revealed that inadequate provision of energy dissipation works to match the high discharge velocity of water had led to certain structures being washed away.
“When the department approached the contracting agencies for attending to the damages, the agencies rejected the request citing that the work was executed strictly as per the designs and drawings approved by the department,” the CAG said in its report.
The contracting agencies claimed that the quality certification had been issued, the CAG said and added “due to defective designing of launching apron and cement concrete blocks, these works could not withstand the discharge velocities and were washed away.”
Ironically, in October last and afterwards, then ministers K.T. Rama Rao and T. Harish Rao had dismissed the sinking of piers at the Medigadda barrage as a routine development and had assured that the state government would not to spend a rupee on repairs. They openly announced several times that the contracting agencies would bear the cost to fix the damage sustained in October, while concealing the flood damage to the three barrages in 2019.
The Congress government has not yet revealed the estimated cost of studies to find the reason for sinking of the Medigadda barrage and who – the government or L&T – would bear the cost of the repairs.
The CAG also pointed to the grave mistake of constructing the Mallannasagar, the largest reservoir under KLIS with a storage capacity of 50 tmc ft (thousand million cubic feet), without conducting detailed seismic studies. The drawings were approved and reservoir was constructed in undue haste without conducting the necessary investigations and studies, it said.
It was found that irrigation department wrote to the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) to conduct seismic analysis in 2016 and again in 2017. Without waiting for the report, the government awarded the contract in December 2017 with a completion timeline of 2020.
The NGRI, in its report submitted in March 2018, clearly stated that “There is a deep-seated vertical fault with significant strike slip motion in the proposed location of the reservoir and that the rocks in the fault zone were highly sheared and fractured.”
Expressing serious concern over the lapse, the CAG said with a project being built without conducting seismic studies and in the absence of any emergency action plan the government left the reservoir as well as lives of people nearby at increased risk.
