AP to complain against water panel chairman

Hyderabad

Oct.12: The state government has decided to lodge a complaint with the Central government against Mr A.K. Bajaj, chairman of the Central Water Commission.
Mr Bajaj in an interview to the media was stated to have observed that the floods in the state were man-made and alleged that the government had not responded to the alerts issued by the CWC, according to top officials in the government.
“This is absolutely wrong. The CWC regional officials were with us all through the floods. They had given us inputs which proved to be wrong some times, but they were with us and even attended meetings with the Chief Minister,” said Mr S. P. Tucker, principal secretary, irrigation department.
In fact, Mr Bajaj’s interview, aired by the BBC, caused considerable embarrassment to the state government.
Taking strong objection to it, the Chief Minister, Mr Rosaiah, asked the irrigation officials to contact Mr Bajaj in this regard.
Interestingly, the state government had submitted a report to the Prime Minister when he came for an aerial survey, praising the CWC’s support during the crisis.
“On September 29, CWC’s daily alert indicated 63,000 cusecs inflow to the Srisailam whereas we received 80,000 cusecs in which 71,000 cusecs was used for power generation and to canals,” explained Mr Rehman, engineer-in-chief.
“On September 30, CWC reading indicated 1.16 lakh inflow whereas we got a report that at Jurala the inflows had already crossed 2 lakh cusecs.”
“On October 1, the CWC alerted us about 1.75 lakh cusecs and by evening upgraded that to 8.12 lakh. But we received 6.4 to 12.37 lakh cusecs from 6 am to 12 midnight.”
“On October 2, we received 22 lakh and 25 lakh cusecs as against 10.95 and 15.89 lakh cusecs predicted by the CWC,” he said.
On the direction of the CM, the irrigation department sent a detailed report on the floods to the Centre, detailing hourly inflows and discharge.
Source::DC