The mounting opposition to land acquisition for the Mallanasagar project, which threatens to submerge 14 villages, is turning out to be the first serious political challenge to Telangana Chief Minister.
DAMARANCHA PRASAD REDDY is a techie working in Hyderabad, Gulam Ahmed Mohammed works as an accountant in Saudi Arabia, and Vanga Srikanth Goud runs a restaurant near Ahmedabad in Gujarat. They are back home to lead a protest along with other twenty somethings in their villages which are in danger of submergence if Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s audacious plan to redesign almost the entire State’s irrigation projects is carried out.
As many as 14 villages with a total population of over 20,000 constitute a contiguous stretch of land about 90 minutes’ drive from the State capital, Hyderabad. Two of them lie in the Chief Minister’s Assembly constituency, Gajwel, in Medak district. Chandrasekhar Rao has proposed a massive reservoir here as part of the re-engineering of a decade-old irrigation and water harvesting plan, which he argues is essential if the State is to meet its future water needs.
The reservoir is named after a local deity, Mallana, as is the Chief Minister’s wont to name irrigation projects after gods, which critics say is possibly to make peace with the local people. But this time it has not helped him. On the contrary, it has become what is arguably Chandrasekhar Rao’s biggest political challenge two years after his party, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), won the State’s first-ever election following a protracted struggle for statehood.
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