Only two of the eight river link projects identified by the Tamil Nadu government in the state were on the economic sector of the Tamil Nadu government for the year ending March 2018, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s report. sanctioned and are still pending brought into the state parliament on Thursday.
The examination of two sanctioned projects showed that, due to the indiscriminate abstraction of groundwater, the number of blocks in the categories was overused and critical in Tamil Nadu was steadily increasing. The state water policy and the state’s 11th five-year plan document (2007-2012) also identified water as a serious limiting factor for agricultural growth in the state and aimed at increasing the usable water resources by networking the river basins within the state.
In the Tamirabarani-Karumeniyar river project, even after seven years, only 21 of 72 packages were completed and the completed sections were not geographically contiguous. The delay was due to poor field research and poor assessment of the land required. As a result, excess water was not used, the planned harvesting area was not reached, and project costs rose 48 percent to 177.33 billion yen, the report said.
In the Cauvery-Agniyar-Gundar river project, despite the construction of a barrage for 248.55 billion yen, the connecting canal was not approved even after the start of the project for 10 years. As a result, 31,571 mcft of excess water was not used in six districts. The non-approval of the remaining six identified projects delayed irrigation benefits for 16 districts of Tamil Nadu, the report added.
The report covers the functioning of ten departments in the business sector with total expenditures of 26,666.77 billion yen over the 2017-18 period. Much of the expenditure was accounted for by the highways and smaller ports (32.36 percent), agriculture (28.28 percent), public works (16.73 percent) and animal husbandry, dairy and fishing (7.42 percent) departments, it says in the report.
