FGG claims Palamuru Rangareddy will be State’s white elephant

Hyderabad: Alleging that the Palamuru Rangareddy project was shifted with a political decision without going into technicalities and feasibility, which resulted in the project becoming a white elephant for the State, the Forum for Good Governance (FGG) has demanded the Chief Minister, A Revanth Reddy, to order an inquiry and initiate action on the person responsible for squandering taxpayers money on this project.

In a press release, FGG president M Padmanabha Reddy said that the Engineering Staff College of India (ESCI) was entrusted with the work to prepare DPR, which proposed lifting of water from Jurala project back waters with an estimated cost of Rs 32,200. The then chief minister (K Chandrashekar Rao) wanted the site of the project to be shifted from Jurala to Srisailam and directed ESCI to urgently revise the DPR. Without going into technicalities and feasibility a political decision was taken. As the matter was urgent, the ESCI, without any filed survey, prepared a revised DPR in two weeks, and without risking, the ESCI suggested two alternatives for lifting the water from Srisailam. The chief minister, during the meeting held on May 21, 2015, approved the second alternate and suggested reducing the height of the lift, directing officials to form a new reservoir at Karvena. In this manner, highly technical issues were finalised not by engineers but by politicians.

The FGG president said that due to defective construction and bad planning, the pump house at Vattem got submerged in September 2024, causing damage to pumps. The project, which started in 2015 with a target of completing in 3 years, is dragging on, and it is not clear when it will be completed. Due to delay, the estimated cost was raised to Rs 50,000 crore from the original estimate of Rs 32,200 crore. So far (by the end of September 2024), an amount of Rs 31,850 crore was spent on this project, and water was not released even for a single acre. “There is a clear political interference,, and the senior officers and engineers, not to displease the political boss, nodded their head for every decision of technical nature taken by him,” he said.