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KCR Shames Naidu On Irrigation!

KCR Shames Naidu On Irrigation!

Not long ago, Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu made tall claims about completion of Pattiseema project in a record time of one year, providing irrigation to lakhs of acres in coastal Andhra, besides saving Krishna water for Rayalaseema.

He went on to claim that he was the first person to link Godavari river with Krishna river. Though the project actually took more than a year, he approved the increase in project cost from Rs 700 crore to Rs 1800 crore for the contractor.

In fact, what the contractor had done was nothing but arranging pumps all along the Polavaram right canal, already constructed during the Y S Rajasekhar Reddy government. For this, Naidu has given himself huge publicity and he is still doing it.

On the other hand, his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao quietly completed the Bhakta Ramadas project, a lift irrigation scheme on Krishna river Left Bank Canal at Palair in Khammam, in a record time of 11 months. This project will irrigate 60,000 acres of land in drought prone areas of the district. And the project cost was just Rs 336 crore.

Ironically, both the Pattiseema project and Bhakta Ramadasu project were constructed by the same contractor – Megha Engineering. But Pattiseema cost six times more than the Bhakta Ramadasu project.

“KCR has shamed Naidu by completing the project in record 11 months without paying a single paisa extra, unlike Pattiseema, in which the contractor was paid additional incentive besides escalated project cost. The benefits are more or less same,” an official said.

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