Sri Ram Sagar Project, the lifeline of Telangana districts completes 50 years on Friday. Located in Balkonda mandal, 50 kilometers away from the district headquarters town on Nizamabad-Adilabad border, the project originally known as the Pochampad project is the lone major project across Godavari river in the entire Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
Construction of this project began on July 26, 1963 after the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had laid the foundation. He drove to the project site by road directly from Srisailam after inaugurating the project there. The Pochampad project constructed with dung lime and metal took 20 years for total completion.
As many as 35 villages were affected with its construction. Among them 16 were fully submerged, seven partially and five villages suffered back water problem. Seven villages lost their agriculture land. Thus, the project took the present shape when people of 35 villages sacrificed all their things.
Even today people of the submerged villages keep making rounds to the government offices for payment of compensation as they initially were not fully justified.
A noteworthy point here is that though the people of the district lost everything they did not get much benefit out of the project. They are able to use only two tmcf of its water through Lakshmi canal as it was built at a higher place.
Now the project is able to provide water for irrigation to 16 lakh acres in Adilabad, Karimnagar, Nizamabad, Warangal and Nalgonda districts. In the recent past the project was in the media now and then as Babli was built upstream in Maharashtra by its Government, posing threat to the existence of the SRSP.
The project with a capacity of 90 tmcf of water has three canals-Saraswathi, Kakatiya and Lakshmi. Besides, a flood flow canal was also dug later on to discharge flood water to downstream districts.
Incidentally, marking this important occasion, the project was full to its brim today and 25,000 cusecs of water was being discharged by lifting eight gates in the morning. Minister for Major Irrigation P. Sudarshan Reddy who visited the project garlanded Nehru statue installed on the right side of the dam and paid tributes to him.
