Minister for Water Resources Devineni Umamaheswara Rao has denied giving instructions to the Kurnool district administration to write a letter to Raichur (Karnataka) Deputy Commissioner to stop repair work on the Rajolibanda Diversion Scheme (RDS) anicut.
Responding to his Telangana counter part, T. Harish Rao’s charge that he had written a letter, Mr. Umamaheswara Rao said: “Will they write if I order them to do it.”
The Minister said that when Telangana Irrigation Minister T. Harish Rao called him on telephone and asked him to meet him for talks he reiterated that the issues should be first discussed by the respective Secretaries and engineers-in-chief and then the Apex Council.
“I have been saying this all along and I have repeated the same to him today,” the Minister said.
Sources close to Mr. Umamaheswara Rao said that Mr. Harish Rao asking the former to meet him for talks to settle these issues was not practical. While Telangana was going ahead with Palamuru-Ranga Reddy Lift Irrigation Scheme, leader of the Opposition Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy was on hunger strike on the same issue. This was hardly the time for the two Irrigation Ministers to sit and thrash out issues, the sources felt.
Mr. Umamaheswara Rao had all through been saying that the real enemy of the Telugu states — Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — was Karnataka and Maharashtra.
The monsoon rains were about to start and this was not the right time for them to be at logger-heads with each other, the sources said.
