A commission of inquiry into the planning and execution of the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project in Telangana has held former chief minister of Telangana K Chandrashekar Rao responsible for what it said was “rampant procedural and financial irregularities, lack of proper planning, design flaws, construction defects and a complete absence of effective operation and maintenance”.
The one-man Justice P C Ghose commission, which pointed out that the decision to construct barrages at Medigadda, Annaram and Sudilla was the “sole and individual decision” of KCR and then irrigation minister T Harish Rao. The commission has pointed out that, violating government business rules, the initial administrative approval for the construction of the three barrages was not placed before the Cabinet.
The commission said in its report that KCR ignored an expert committee recommendation of January 21, 2015, which “rejected” the proposal to construct a barrage at Medigadda. The committee had said that the Medigadda barrage should not be constructed because of “prohibitive cost and time consumption”.
“The expert committee report was intentionally… not considered and kept in cold storage by the then chief minister and minister for irrigation,” the report said.
The report was tabled before incumbent Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy’s Cabinet on Monday.
The P C Ghose commission was constituted after one of the pillars of the Medigadda barrage sank on October 21, 2023. This led to widespread flooding, and a team from the National Dam Safety Authority (NDSA) examined the sunken pillar — No 20 of block 7 — on October 25. On February 13, 2024, the Congress government in the state asked the NDSA to conduct a “thorough inspection of the design and construction of the three barrages” of the project.
According to the commission’s report, the cost of the project was initially estimated to be Rs 71,436 crore. The costs went up due to a change in specification, design, drawings, and other reasons, the commission noted. This led to “wrongful syphoning of funds from the public exchequer”, the commission’s report said.
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The scathing report further said that “there was absolutely no operation and maintenance of whatsoever nature, including periodical checks or inspections, pre- and post monsoon inspections and reports etc, of these three barrages at any time”.
The report also found design deficiencies in that the barrages that were designed as permeable foundations were “utilised as storage structures”, which is against standard practice. The barrages were also kept at full capacity throughout to lift water through pumps, even as the barrages “were diversion structures and not storage structures”. Running the barrages at full capacity seemed to have caused the distress, the commission noted.
The KCR government also issued a substantial construction completion certificate for Medigadda to the construction agency without proper checks and balances, the report said. “The award of the certificate was wrong, illegal and tainted with malice to do undue favour to the agency,” the report read.
Apart from indicting KCR, the report also said that T Harish Rao, the then minister for irrigation, “intentionally did not consider the report of the expert committee”. It also said the then minister for finance Eatala Rajender demonstrated a “lack of commitment and integrity in safeguarding the financial and economic health of the newly formed state”.
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The commission concluded that the project was characterised by “rampant and brazen financial irregularities”.
