Telangana requests Supreme Court to vacate stay on Kaleshwaram project
The Telangana government on Thursday filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking to vacate a stay ordered on the ongoing works of Kaleshwaram lift irrigation scheme expanding its scope for drawing more water from Godavari river to provide more irrigation facilities to the command area in the state.
In its petition, the irrigation department said it was proposed to draw an additional one tmc ft (thousand million cubic feet) of water from Godavari river, apart from the originally planned two tmc ft, only for optimising the utilisation of 240 tmc ft of water during the rainy season, which will be there for a short period.
An official of the irrigation department said the government had informed the Supreme Court that since the additional 1 tmc ft component was not a new project and was only a part and parcel of existing Kaleshwaram project, there was no need for any additional clearances.
“The project already has all statutory clearances from the Central Water Commission. Yet, we have submitted the detailed project report (DPR) on this additional component to the CWC as well as the Godavari River Management Board (GRMB) under the Union Jal Sakthi ministry,” the official said.
However, the GRMB had refused to examine the DPR and stopped the process of according statutory clearances for additional 1 tmc ft works of Kaleshwaram project on the grounds that the Supreme Court had ordered maintenance of a status quo.
“Hence, we requested the court to vacate the status quo order, so that the Centre can examine the DPR and grant permission for the same,” the official said.
It may be mentioned that the Supreme Court on July 27 ordered status quo on the project works, after hearing a batch of petitions which alleged that the Telangana government was increasing the capacity of the project without any clearances.
The Telangana government told the court that the petitions questioning the project’s expansion were politically motivated. It claimed that the farmers whom the expansion would impact had already accepted compensation from the government.
On September 21, state special chief secretary Rajat Kumar wrote a letter to Union Jal Sakthi ministry secretary Pankaj Kumar reiterating that the additional drawl of water did not amount to a new project and that it was only part of the ongoing Kaleshwaram project.
He recalled that chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao had already represented the issue with the Centre, requesting that the additional water drawl component be deleted from the list. of un-approved projects.
“All the requisite information sought by the CWC in this regard has been submitted by the state government. Finally,’ the matter has been referred to GRMB, with the recommendations of CWC, for their comments. At this stage stopping of the process by GRMB will cause unnecessary delay to the project,” he said.
