A delegation of YSR Congress (YSRCP) MPs led by V. Vijaya Sai Reddy met Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Delhi on Monday and submitted a memorandum requesting her to accord investment clearance for the Polavaram project as recommended by the Polavaram Project Authority (PPA) and Central Water Commission and accepted by the technical advisory committee of the Ministry of Jal Shakti at 2017-18 price level of ₹55,656.87 crore at the earliest to facilitate the completion of Land Acquisition (LA) and Relief and Rehabilitation (R&R) works by June 2022.
The MPs also requested the Union Minister to reimburse the expenditure incurred by the State government on the project, without restricting funding to component-wise eligibility and to consider the reimbursement as per the actual costs of LA and R&R compensation for the project-affected families under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
The MPs stated that the Government of Andhra Pradesh is only an executing agency of the project which was declared a national project under Section.90(1) of the A.P. Reorganisation Act, 2014 (APRA) and that a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) was created in May 2014 for executing the project through State government’s departments and other expert agencies.
The investment clearance was originally given on the basis of the 2010-11 price level and the A.P. government had submitted revised cost estimates at the 2017-18 price level on being asked by the PPA to do so. The MPs observed that over seven years have passed since the enactment of the APRA but the project has not picked up pace due to the Central government’s apathy in approving the second revised cost estimates. The Centre should, therefore, give investment clearance without further delay, they said.
