HYDERABAD : Irrigation and Civil Supplies Minister Capt. N. Uttam Kumar Reddy on Sunday told the Telangana Legislative Assembly that the collapse of the Medigadda barrage under the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project (KLIP) has left the state facing “the biggest man-made and financial disaster in independent India,” as key civil-works assets have remained unusable for nearly two years and the state is saddled with costs that he said were avoidable and unsupported by sound engineering or administrative discipline. Opening the debate on the Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose Commission of Inquiry report, he alleged that decisions of the previous TRS (now BRS) government ignored expert warnings, altered designs without approvals, and led to a rapid collapse of core structures that had been projected as a flagship of Telangana’s irrigation push.
Reconstructing the chronology for the House, Uttam Kumar Reddy said six piers of Block-7 of the Medigadda barrage sank on 21 October 2023 and an FIR was filed the next day at Mahadevpur Police Station. He described Medigadda as the “heart” of Kaleshwaram, integral to the lifting chain with Annaram and Sundilla, and stated that together the three barrages and their pump houses cost about Rs 21,000 crore which has yielded no utility since the failure, rendering the system defunct for 20 months. Citing the National Dam Safety Authority (NDSA), which inspected the site on 24 October 2023, he said experts attributed the distress to poor planning and design, weak foundations and lack of quality control, warned that other blocks faced similar risk, and advised that storing water in the present condition would worsen damage; the Authority’s assessment, he said, concluded that the barrage was useless unless fully rehabilitated.
The Minister located the failure in a larger policy pivot away from the earlier Dr B.R. Ambedkar Pranahita–Chevella project. He recalled that the Congress government launched Pranahita-Chevella in 2009 with Central Water Commission processing under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme, and that interstate arrangements with Maharashtra on barrage levels and submergence studies were underway through an interstate board process supported by the Central Water and Power Research Station, Pune. By 2014, he said, Rs 11,679 crore had been spent—about 30% of the then estimated cost of Rs 38,500 crore, before the new state government abandoned the plan and pushed a redesign on the Godavari at Medigadda, Annaram and Sundilla. He said the shift was taken up as Kaleshwaram with a sanctioned outlay of about Rs 87,449 crore and then expanded, with the CAG later reporting a figure of Rs 1.27 lakh crore and projections now pointing to a total of about Rs 1.47 lakh crore, compared to what he called a viable, lower-cost Pranahita–Chevella pathway.
Also Read-
Uttam Kumar Reddy alleged that key choices preceded technical due diligence. He stated that WAPCOS was engaged to prepare the DPR but that the decision to build a barrage at Medigadda had effectively been made even before the study was scrutinised, and that on the very day WAPCOS submitted the DPR, directions were issued to proceed with estimates and go ahead, without departmental vetting or technical examination, leading to a Government Order (GO Ms. No. 231) on 1 March 2016 approving Medigadda at Rs 2,600 crore, later revised upwards to Rs 4,500 crore, without cabinet approval. He added that a committee of retired engineers constituted in January 2015, presented by the then Chief Minister as respected experts, had explicitly advised against constructing a barrage near Medigadda and against a costly lift to Mid Manair, but their recommendation “was not taken into account,” according to records cited by the department to the Commission.
The Minister contrasted the promised hydrology with delivered performance. He said the scheme was marketed on an assurance of lifting 195 TMC a year and irrigating 34 lakh acres while stabilising an additional 18 lakh acres, but from inauguration in 2019 to the collapse in 2023, the total water lifted was 162 TMC in five years. Of that, 32 TMC was let back to sea and 13 TMC was impounded in reservoirs like Kondapochamma, Mallanna Sagar and Ranganayaka Sagar, leaving net usable water at 101 TMC over that period, about 20.2 TMC a year, which, he said, did not create even one lakh acres of new ayacut and did not achieve stabilisation claims. He framed this as the practical outcome of engineering and contract decisions that, in his telling, bypassed basic safeguards and then persisted with full storage against warnings, culminating in a structural failure within four years of commissioning, an occurrence he labelled unprecedented for a public irrigation asset of this size in independent India.
He read portions of the NDSA’s technical diagnosis for the House record: settlement of the barrage raft with monolithic piers settling, moving and cracking; likely piping with transport of foundation material; inadequate bearing capacity of foundation strata; failure of secant piles; and construction deficiencies traceable to an absence of stringent quality control in subsurface secant piles and in the plinth connection between the raft and cut-offs, alongside what the Authority said appeared to be non-compliance with provisions of the Dam Safety Act, 2021 for a high-risk structure. The Authority, he said, recommended that filling the reservoir in the present condition should not be resorted to and that the whole barrage warranted rehabilitation given commonalities suggesting other blocks might fail similarly.
Uttam Kumar Reddy also cited Vigilance and Enforcement material placed before the Commission which, he said, recorded that items originally proposed in the DPR, diaphragm walls and Z-type sheet piles, were replaced in a 9 January 2017 meeting chaired by the then Irrigation Minister with secant pile cut-offs, even though no Indian Standard code exists for secant cut-off piles and without verifying whether the executing agency had experience with similar works. The Vigilance note, he said, stressed that new items must be awarded only after checking competence and after statutory clearances, and flagged that contracts had been issued before clearances, while completion certificates and bank guarantees were handled prematurely, and revised estimates and extensions lacked justification.
Presenting the accountability track, Uttam Kumar Reddy said the current government appointed a Judicial Commission of Inquiry in March 2024 under Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, former judge of the Supreme Court and India’s first Lokpal, to examine alleged negligence, irregularities and lacunae in planning, design and construction of Medigadda, Annaram and Sundilla, as well as contracting, quality control, and operation and maintenance lapses that led to structural damage. He said the Commission notified widely for submissions, examined 119 individuals including the then Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao, then Irrigation Minister T. Harish Rao and then Finance Minister Eatala Rajender, received over a hundred affidavits from citizens, NGOs and officials, visited the barrage sites, and submitted its report to the government on 31 July. A three-member IAS committee summarised the findings for the Cabinet, and the Cabinet resolved to place the report before the Assembly for discussion and then decide on the next course of action, which he said evidenced transparency and absence of vendetta.
He said the Commission’s findings were categorical on multiple counts: wrong planning or no planning with respect to estimates and administrative approvals; calling and awarding of contracts before the CWC approved the DPR; defects in designs and drawings; absence of scope to check and ensure quality control during execution; premature completion certificates and premature release of bank guarantees; unjustified revised estimates; and unjustified extensions of time. Crucially, he said, the Commission held that the then Chief Minister could be directly and vicariously made accountable for irregularities and illegalities in planning, construction, completion, operation and maintenance of the three barrages, identifying lapses and financial implications and fixing responsibility on political executives, IAS officers and engineering staff.
Uttam Kumar Reddy responded to criticism from the Opposition by noting that when Medigadda collapsed in October 2023, BRS was in office, and that the party had supported the Dam Safety Authority Bill in Parliament; he said BRS leaders now “speak loosely” about the NDSA despite having backed the statute that created it. He added that after the present government took office on 7 December 2023, water was not stored in the three barrages in deference to the Authority’s caution that impounding would aggravate distress, and that despite non-use of Kaleshwaram water after December, Telangana recorded the highest-ever paddy output in kharif and rabi—evidence, he argued, that agriculture growth was achieved despite Kaleshwaram rather than because of it.
He also advanced an opportunity-cost argument, asserting that for roughly Rs 1 lakh crore sunk into Kaleshwaram without durable benefits, Telangana could have completed the earlier Pranahita–Chevella at Rs 38,500 crore and finished several ongoing lift schemes from the previous decade, Kalwakurthy, Nettampadu, Rajiv Bheema and the J. Chokka Rao Devadula system, while strengthening medium and minor irrigation at a fraction of the burden. He said that by 2014, with about a third of Pranahita–Chevella already executed and statutory processes substantially advanced, continuing on that path would have delivered assured irrigation to large tracts in north Telangana without the hydropower intensity and recurring costs embedded in the Kaleshwaram configuration.
Returning to the construction sequence, the Minister said departmental records and correspondence placed before the Commission show that engineers had cautioned as early as 2019 that all three barrages were showing serious problems and had suggested dewatering and repairs, but that full storage continued, against advice, until the system failed. He read excerpts to that effect and said the NDSA’s site inspection immediately after the incident confirmed the pattern of distress and amplified the warning against any attempt to fill in the present condition. He argued that in addition to engineering faults, managerial choices – contracts called before central approvals, design changes without independent vetting, premature certifications – created conditions in which even known problems were allowed to compound.
On interstate context, he reminded the House that the earlier Andhra Pradesh–Maharashtra dialogue had focused on submergence optimisation with comparative levels of 148, 150 and 152 metres at Tummidihatti, and that after bifurcation the interstate board met and resolved to take up Tumdi Hatti at 148 metres and Medigadda at 100 metres on the Godavari. In his telling, that framework still did not justify the unilateral recasting of the project into an expensive lift dominated by Medigadda in the form and timing chosen, particularly when the retired engineers’ committee had flagged feasibility and cost. He said the records showed the letter-trail to the Centre seeking national status recognition and AIBP support for Pranahita–Chevella, and that the shift to Kaleshwaram effectively threw away a practical route to early benefits in favour of a technically fragile avenue with high recurring power requirements – 8,450 MW at design – financed on the back of rising state liabilities.
Uttam Kumar Reddy tabled the Commission’s report and reiterated that the government’s approach would be democratic and within law: the Cabinet had explicitly refrained from deciding immediate punitive measures before placing the report before the House and hearing members across parties; the next steps, he said, would follow deliberation in the legislature and the legal processes available for recovery and accountability. He repeated that the findings he read were not his words but the conclusions of a judicial commission headed by a Supreme Court judge, supported by expert submissions and site inspections.
He also drew a distinction between barrage and dam design, picking up a line from the NDSA summary: that in Kaleshwaram’s execution, the difference appears to have been elided in practice – barrages worldwide are meant to store minimal volumes (2–3 TMC at most in such configurations), he said, whereas Medigadda was filled to the brim despite cautions, and this contributed to foundation distress. He called it a textbook case of how not to operate a barrage in its commissioning phase, and said the choice was doubly questionable given the pending observations on pile systems and bearing strata.
In the course of the debate, he reminded the House that the state had already suffered a measurable utilisation shortfall against the advertised hydrology: 162 TMC lifted in five years against an annual 195-TMC assurance, with about a fifth of that subsequently unutilised or impounded elsewhere, and only about 101 TMC net over the period available to irrigation – numbers he said came from departmental records tabled for the Commission and the Assembly. He framed the difference between promise and delivery as the central civic injury of the episode: beyond rupees spent and concrete poured, he said, were farmers who were promised augmentation and stabilisation that did not arrive while state finances absorbed a liability that could otherwise have been distributed across multiple viable assets.
He closed by addressing the political frame. Opposition charges of “Congress vendetta,” he said, rang hollow against the government’s conduct – constituting a Commission of Inquiry under a widely respected jurist, inviting public submissions, examining 119 persons including former top political executives, placing the report before the Cabinet and then the Assembly, and proceeding only thereafter. The people of Telangana, he said, deserved a transparent accounting and a lawful path to remedy; the government, he promised, would proceed strictly in accordance with law.
