Andhra Pradesh

Babli issue sub-judice, says A.P. Minister

Special Correspondent

`Work should be kept pending till the case is disposed'

HYDERABAD: Andhra Pradesh Major Irrigation Minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah has contested the view purportedly expressed by Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, after leading a delegation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday that "there is no court direction to stop Babli project and hence, its construction will be continued."

"The Supreme Court may not have issued any direction to halt Babli work, but the matter is sub-judice. This means that when a matter is pending before a court, everything relating to that should is halted," Mr. Lakshmaiah told a press conference here on Wednesday.

He explained that Mr. Vilasrao had tacitly endorsed the principle when he gave a commitment to his Andhra Pradesh counterpart Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, after attending a meeting convened by Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz in April last. The assurance was to put the Babli work on hold until the two States arrived at an understanding. As such, the work should be kept pending till the apex court disposed of the case.

Mr. Lakshmaiah termed the construction of Babli as "a clear violation of all the inter-State agreements" in force between the two States, which provided for leaving the storage area of the Sriramsagar project as "free zone". Babli was "illegal" as Maharashtra had already exhausted all its allocation out of the Godavari. On Mr. Vilasrao's reported statement that Mr. Soz should not have addressed a letter to Maharashtra asking it to stop the work, the Minister said what the latter did was "an appropriate action". Unlike in the case of any other project, the Centre had issued orders four times asking Maharashtra to keep Babli in abeyance. He denied `politicising' the Babli issue, and said the demand for halting the project was the "cry of the people from five Telangana districts".

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