‘Project Yatra’ to find flaws

Hyderabad: Sharpening its arsenal for the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress is now trying to establish that a lot of irregularities had taken place in the construction of various irrigation projects resulting in huge losses to the state exchequer.

The Congress party during its campaign for the Assembly elections had alleged that there were faults in the design of the irrigation projects like Kaleshwaram, Medigadda and Annaram and that a lot of corruption had taken place. The government has also made this point in the white paper it had tabled in the Assembly recently.

In continuation of this, some ministers would take up ‘Project Yatra’ on Friday, to study the design faults and the allegations, besides looking into the claims of construction agencies like L&T that they had no role in the project design and the previous government had put pressure on them to complete the project at the breakneck speed.

Hence a two-member team of ministers, consisting of Irrigation Minister N Uttam Kumar Reddy and IT Minister D Sridhar Babu, would visit the Medigadda barrage and examine it.

Seniormost irrigation officials and the representatives of the L&T contract agency will also be part of the team. Later, they would also visit Annaram and Sundilla pumphouses.

The government, in fact, wanted to make a power point presentation on the irrigation projects during the just concluded brief Assembly session. But now it has been decided that the PPT should be made after a thorough study of the project and visiting the project site. Then the PPT would be made based on the field study. This PPT would form one of the main issues during Congress’ campaign for the Lok Sabha elections. A team of engineering officials would also visit other ongoing Sita Rama lift Irrigation project, Palamuru Rangareddy Lift Scheme, etc, and submit a status report to the government.