Telangana Agriculture Minister S Niranjan Reddy today criticised that the Centre for having taken "an unfortunate decision" on the issue of the sharing of the waters of the Krishna basin between the two Telugu states.
Talking to the press at the ministers' quarters in Hyderabad, Reddy slammed the Modi-led Centre for releasing
a gazette notification on the issue some days ago.
He claimed, "The Centre is conspiring against Telangana. It did not help us construct any of the irrigation or power projects and did not even grant national status to them. Then it released a gazette notification that can be considered unconstitutional. The notice will not help resolve the water row between Telangana and Andhra Pradesh."
"Instead of leaving the handling of the issue to the National Green Tribunal, the Centre intervened and ended up taking the wrong decision. The notification is not acceptable to the people of our state and must be withdraw immediately. This must be done if the Centre wants to at all protect the interests of the two Telugu states. Its decision is unilateral and will cause our state to incur losses. In fact, it will make AP face losses as well. We would much rather remain happy with the construction of our own projects and slowly work towards getting our share of the Krishna waters," the minister added.
Reddy also accused the Centre of "playing with the lives of the people" and said that Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao would take a call on the matter of the notification after getting a legal opinion on the same.
The Centre's attempt to resolve the Telangana-AP water feud had prompted it to release a gazette notification on July 15. In the notification, the Centre had finally detailed the jurisdictions of the Krishna River Management Board (KRMB) and the Godavari River Management Board (GRMB), years after the formation of the two bodies - now, the two boards will have the power to run all water projects, including hydropower generation ones, in the two river basins from October 14.
However, this does not seem to have made much of difference in lessening tensions. In fact, the Telangana government has been opposed to the notification ever since its release.