Union Minister for Water Resources Nitin Gadkari met the State Water Resources Department officials and members of the Polavaram Project Authority (PPA) in Delhi on Tuesday as a prelude to the visit to the Polavaram project site on Saturday.
The Minister asked the experts ideas for increasing the pace of work and for making default payments from the impress.
The Minister in a meeting with State Water Resources Minister Devineni Umamaheswara Rao on December 6 said he would visit the project site once in fortnight to ensure that there were no hurdles. A week later, he told Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu that efforts would be made to meet the deadline of pushing water into the canals by gravity in 2018 itself.
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There are, however, a few critical issues that need to be resolved by the Central government.
On top of the list are the changing of the prime contractor Transstroy and finalising the designs for the part of the cofferdam upstream the Earth-cum-Rock filled (ECRF) Dam. There are also other issues like release of funds for the work completed, land acquisition and the Resettlement and Rehabilitation.
The prime impediment to changing the contractor was an increase in cost estimation. The contract was awarded to Transstroy because it quoted the lowest, i.e., 14%, rates on the day. The cost estimate increased from ₹16,010 crore at 2010-11 price level to ₹58,319 crore at April 1, 2014 price level. The Centre argued that changing the contractor would further escalate the cost. It even suggested that the State should bear the increase.
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There is also the ticklish issue of the huge increase in land acquisition and Resettlement and Rehabilitation in accordance to the new LA and R&R Act 2013. From around ₹3,000 crore, the cost of LA and R&R went up to ₹33,000 crore.
Mr. Gadkari gave the prime contractor one month to improve performance and set the target of 7,000 cubic metres of concrete a day.