Babli barrage row: TDP plans to make it mass movement

Andhra alleges that Maharashtra is building a barrage 10 km from its border, which will stop water from flowing into the Sriramsager reservoir and will leave seven districts of Telangana without water.

Speaking to the media on Sunday, Naidu said that when his team attended the meeting on Saturday, he found that the PMO had not even prepared a proper brief for the meeting, and that the Prime Minister himself was unprepared.

“I have interacted with 10 prime ministers so far. Whenever a meeting takes place, PMO puts up a brief, and an interaction follows that. This time, no brief was put up. It looks like the Prime Minister was not prepared,” Naidu said.

He said his party will hold an “awareness generation programme” in five districts in north Telangana “to let the public know how much is at stake if the barrage is built”. Party officials said that rallies would be carried out by party members to mobilise the people for a public protest.

Criticising the government’s way of handling the issue, Naidu said, “The present Congress government does not have proper planning or vision about the Babli project. They (the state government) did not represent it properly, to stop it immediately.” “It is unfortunate that the Congress in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and at the Centre is not able to do anything about it.”

The Babli issue shot into focus last year when Maharashtra started building barrages on the Godavari. Congress MP from Nizamabad, where the Godavari enters AP, filed a suit in the Supreme Court asking for the construction to be stayed. The AP government attached itself to this petition. Recently, the government alleged that Maharashtra has started rebuilding the dam. While Maharashtra says the barrage stores only 2.75 tmc of water, AP alleges that it actually stores 25tmc of water, making the Sriramsagar project pointless.