Given the present condition of many a water body in Adilabad, restoration of tanks under Mission Kakatiya could be as difficult as turning the clock back notwithstanding the government’s resolve. The effort is likely to face great hurdles, even law and order problem, unless the government matches its enthusiasm for restoration work with proper groundwork, according to officials in the Irrigation Department.
The demand for housing, especially in urban areas, has resulted in large scale encroachments on tank beds in all major towns in the district. Not only slums but large housing colonies have come up illegally on what used to be water bodies until a couple of decades ago.
The government has identified 3,951 tanks for restoration under the Mission Kakatiya-Mana Vooru Mana Cheruvu programme in the district in a phased manner spread across the coming five years. In the first phase, as many as 783 tanks will be restored, of which estimates worth over Rs. 190 crore have been readied.
According to sources, restoration work on tanks in Nirmal and Adilabad towns are set to pose the biggest challenge for the government for their quantum of encroachments, though most of the water bodies in Asifabad and Mancherial Irrigation Divisions are no different. “The gravity of the task will surface only when the survey of encroachments is done,” observes Adilabad Revenue Divisional Officer A. Sudhakar Reddy, who also expects the eviction problem to pose ‘challenges’ to the administration.
The Irrigation Department has already submitted a list of tanks for which survey needs to be conducted before restoration work in the form of de-siltation begins sometime in January next year. A survey done earlier this year had found the bed of Bada talab tank in Khanapur to consist of 237 illegal houses besides a hundred odd ones on its feeder channel and a couple of scores of pucca houses in the Kummari kunta tank, which once served as the feeder water body for the bigger tank.
In Nirmal town, all its 11 chain link tanks have encroachments but the worst cases are the Dharmasagar tank near the bus stand, the Kancheronni cheruvu and the Manjulapur tank. A cumulative of over 25 acres of land in these tanks now have illegal housing colonies and commercial complexes belonging to people with political connections sprawled across, which is likely to make tank restoration a difficult task.
