Hyderabad: Tughluquian. This one word describes the entire attitude and approach of the former BRS government in Telangana, headed by K. Chandrashekar Rao as its chief minister, who was also the irrigation minister during his second term in office, towards the much-touted Kaleshwaram project.
The project, which cost the people of Telangana an eye-watering Rs 1.2 lakh crore, is currently crumbling. What has been left for the people of the state is a practically defunct project, which was fondly described by the then BRS government as a world record-setting “engineering marvel”.
The disaster at Medigadda that came to light on October 21, 2023, when a portion of it cracked and sank, also revealed something the irrigation department, headed by Chandrashekar Rao got good at: Keeping secrets that can destroy the then chief minister’s reputation as the man who ‘designed’ the project, a claim made by him many times, hidden.
The events that unfolded after the 2019 floods in Godavari and Pranahita not only wreaked havoc on Medigadda, but also left its upstream Sundilla and Annaram barrages tottering.
While the Medigadda Barrage was built by L&T, the one at Sundilla was built by Navayuga Engineering Company Ltd., and the Annaram one by Afcons Infrastructure.
With the situation at Medigadda alarming, the Congress government has so far focused its investigations on this barrage, built after the confluence of Pranahita and Godavari rivers.
Inquiries by Deccan Chronicle revealed that as far back as November 2019, L&T informed the irrigation department of damage in the downstream apron and cement concrete blocks placed to act as flood force dissipators, among other damages, at Medigadda.
The construction company also made it clear on May 18, 2020, to the department that these damages were due to “the high shooting velocity” of water released from the barrage’s gates during the flood period, and asked the department for re-modelling studies, revised designs and drawings to bring the barrage back into a ‘safe condition’.
Before the communication from L&T, following the 2019 events, engineers from the irrigation department and the design team from its Central Designs Organization that provided the engineering drawings for the construction of the barrage, along with specialists from Central Water and Power Research Station in Pune visited Medigadda in January 2020 to take stock of the damages and decided to take further action.
A follow-up meeting that also saw specialists from Telangana State Engineering Research Laboratories join irrigation, CWPRS, and L&T representatives, saw the CDO being told to re-conduct modelling studies with various options for reducing the shooting velocity of water. However, there was no further development in this regard.
Adding to the story of neglect is an internal department report by Prof. Rama Raju, a former irrigation engineer-in-chief, who, after visiting the barrage in April 2022, made it clear that because of the damages, the joints between the apron (the area where the released water first hits) and the foundation built on secant piles, has become vulnerable.
Further, the department was asked to prepare an operation manual for all three barrages as they were built using the same designs provided by the Central Design Organization, run by the department.
According to sources, no such manual was either prepared or if prepared, not passed on to the contractors.
All of this was to prevent further damages to Medigadda and other barrages in the 2022-23 flood season. As heavy floods unfolded in 2022 — though claimed as unprecedented by the BRS government — they proved fatal to Medigadda and revealed the true cost of the lackadaisical attitude or deliberate ignorance of loud and repeated warning bells by the Chandrashekar Rao-led government.
After disaster hit Medigadda, it was again Prof. Rama Raju, at a meeting in the irrigation department on October 27, 2023, who declared that the barrage was designed to withstand a surface velocity of water of up to 6 metres per second.
He also reportedly drove a nail into the much-flaunted design of the whole project, declaring that at multiple barrages on the river — Sundialla and Annaram — the rate of flow rose to 15-16 metres per second. The three flood seasons before the Medigadda disaster saw water speed reach 22 metres per second, something the barrage was not designed to cope with.
Expert sources in irrigation technicalities and design said that the factor of multiple barrages and releases from which, during floods, would drive the flow speed higher was something no one who claims expertise in planning and design of irrigation projects would ever agree to in the first place.
The BRS government, soon after a portion of Medigadda sank, had claimed that L&T would be held responsible for the repairs and the cost of repairs, but the company, while promising to assist in these works, made it clear to the then government that it cannot be held liable for the same.
The company is learnt to have written multiple times to the BRS government about the problems emerging at Medigadda since the 2019 floods, and the action that needed to be taken, but that their efforts failed as the irrigation department chose not to respond to the concerns, or seeking fresh designs to arrest the damage, and so on.
Although the BRS government tried to float a narrative that L&T would be responsible not just for the repairs but also would foot the cost of the repairs, facts point that this line adopted by BRS will not likely stand legal scrutiny as the company pointed out in multiple letters to the irrigation department of the goings-on and sought inputs but these never came, as well as making it clear that the department had also issued it a completion certificate with an effective date of June 29, 2020.
It was reliably learnt that L&T, on various occasions, wrote to the department, including letters on May 18, 2020, May 17, 2023, and June 16, 2023, on these issues and that as a responsible contractor, it was willing to execute the works needed at a rate to be agreed upon.
Sources said that the real problems at Medigadda, may not be those created or contributed to by L&T but design and design assumptions of the barrage by the irrigation department, inappropriate foundation designs, serious lapses in monitoring and maintenance, and not taking up of remedial measures since Chandrashekar Rao inaugurated the barrage in 2019.
