HYDERABAD: BRS working president K.T. Rama Rao on Tuesday said he could not answer questions on the then BRS government’s specific responses and action when it began receiving reports from irrigation engineers and contracting companies about problems arising at the Medigadda and other barrages of the Kaleshwaram project.
“I was not in the loop of, in the scheme of things, especially when it comes to irrigation matters because that was not my ministry,” he said. “I can tell you. We were vigilant. We were monitoring. We were definitely keenly looking at everything that was being sent.”
Rama Rao, at a press conference on Medigadda barrage situation, was responding to questions on what the government did when these reports started coming in.
He maintained there was “no negligence as such but things do happen,” adding “in the past too these things have happened,” and referred to several past incidents at other projects, including gates at irrigation projects getting washed away, or under construction structures collapsed including at Kaddam dam, or the problems at Musi project, Prakasam or Dowlaiswaram barrages, and Gundla Vagu project.
The then BRS government began impounding water at Medigadda — the last of the three Kaleshwaram lift irrigation scheme barrages — and the two upstream of it at Annaram and Sundilla, in 2019.
Soon after, irrigation department engineers started noticing problems including seepage from under the foundations of the barrages, and slow development of cracks in the barrage structures, and these were reported to their higher ups in the chain of command.
While Rama Rao was not the irrigation minister in the second term of the BRS government after the BRS won the 2018 Assembly elections, it was the BRS president and the then chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao who held the irrigation portfolio for his entire second term in office, when the problems at the barrages began getting reported.
