A day after the Bihar Assembly poll dates were announced, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Thursday that his Ministry was mulling ways to revive the North Koel reservoir dam project in Jharkhand, which will bring irrigation benefits to farmers in Bihar.
The project, once completed, will irrigate 1.25 lakh hectares of farm land in Bihar, he said.
Hitting back at the Congress for accusing the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of “hawa baazi” (hot air), he said neither the Congress, nor the Janata Dal (U)’s Nitish Kumar or the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Lalu Prasad had taken the initiative to operationalise the dam, thus depriving the State of its benefits all these years.
The Minister spoke about the proposal to revive the Koel project while responding to a query on how BJP workers could organise railway tours for people in Bihar in the newly inaugurated Patna-Mumbai Suvidha trains to visit Mumbai and see the development and progress made there. Such tours could be considered a breach of the model code of conduct since the Bihar poll dates have already been announced.
The Minister said the Congress was desperate to stay alive and was making false accusations against the BJP, and therefore, it was necessary to prove to the people that the BJP was genuinely in favour of bringing the benefits of development to the State.
The North Koel dam, located in Palamau in Jharkhand, is fully constructed since 1993. All it needs is the sluice gates to be opened up, but no progress has been made on this front so far, Mr. Javadekar told journalists. Around 6,203 hectares of forestland, which is likely to be entirely submerged by the North Koel reservoir, is a bottleneck in the operation of the dam project.
“If made fully functional, this project will bring Rs. 12 crore worth of benefits to farmers in Bihar,” the Minister said. The dam project is designed to deliver 90 per cent of irrigation benefits to Bihar and 10 per cent of electricity generated through hydropower to Bihar.
Western Ghats notification renewed
The notification for demarcating eco-sensitive zones in the Western Ghats have been renewed to extend the deadline for submission of reports by States by 60 days, Mr. Javadekar announced. “We did this to ensure that the 2013 notification did not lapse,” the Minister said. He countered claims made by some sections of the press that the new notification would reduce the Eco-Sensitive Zones significantly, as two States -- Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra – had not yet submitted their reports and any assessment in this regard could only be done after putting together the recommendations of all six Western Ghats States.
Mr. Javadekar is planning a visit to the Andaman and Nicobar islands next month, when he will undertake an assessment of demarcating eco-sensitive zones there. “The islands have declared 93 per cent of land as forests, which if explored properly can help India attain self-sufficiency in production of edible oil, most of which India imports right now,” he said. To a query on whether such explorations of forests would not go against forest laws, the Minister quipped that environmental governance must aid development, not obstruct it.
