Congress’s Kaleshwaram answer is still incomplete

The Congress government in Telangana has been invoking safety concerns around Kaleshwaram, but the Central Water Commission and National Dam Safety Authority have reportedly told the Telangana High Court that decisions on operating the barrages rest with the State Dam Safety Organisation and the project authority — not with them. That distinction is inconvenient, which is probably why it keeps getting flattened into a convenient slogan.

The NDSA’s reported technical position is serious: damaged barrage infrastructure should be rehabilitated before it is restored to operation. A technical oversight committee has been constituted, and construction, testing and quality checks remain the project authority’s responsibility. None of that establishes that the entire system, or every connected component, is unusable in every restricted form.

Nor does the available record prove the opposing political claim that 20,000 cusecs was passing Kannepalli and could safely have been lifted. That figure was attributed to BRS leaders and has not been independently confirmed through gauge data, pump logs or an engineering assessment. Turning it into a fact would be as careless as turning the NDSA’s safety recommendations into a blanket ban.

The actual accountability question is narrower and harder to evade: what has Telangana’s own authorised engineering system decided can be operated, at what limits, under what safeguards and with what residual risk? The Irrigation Department, State Dam Safety Organisation and project authority have not published that assessment in the material reviewed. The Congress government in Telangana cannot outsource that decision to Delhi and then complain about Delhi’s answer. If it wants the pumps kept off, it should publish the state engineering file that says why.