Mission Bhagiratha needs upkeep, not slogans
Harish Rao presses the Congress government to fund, fix and monitor Telangana’s drinking-water network. The state’s own budget shows an O&M head exists — the fight is over adequacy and delivery, not existence.
Mission Bhagiratha’s maintenance line exists on paper; the question is whether it is enough and reaches the repair crews.
BRS legislature party deputy leader T. Harish Rao used his Sunday to say the quiet part aloud: building Mission Bhagiratha was the hard lift; keeping it running is the real job. The report that carried his remarks quotes him calling for dedicated funds, urgent repairs to leaking lines and failed motors, a monitoring cell for outages, and to keep the scheme out of party games — “Governments may change, but people’s needs do not.”
The scale he is talking about is not guesswork. The department’s own brief says the network covers 2.72 crore people across 23,861 rural habitations with 1.50 lakh km of pipeline, 77 intakes, 123 treatment plants and 35,716 rural overhead reservoirs, designed to deliver 100–150 litres per person per day depending on where you live. Ninety-eight percent of transmission runs by gravity; the contractors carry defect liability for five years and O&M obligations for ten.
Where the Congress government enters this is maintenance. Rao alleges pipeline leakages, motor and pumping failures, power interruptions, repair delays and supply disruptions — as the report quotes him; we have not seen a statewide incident log to size that. What the paperwork does show is that “Operation and Maintenance of Mission Bhagiratha” exists as a budget head. One state appendix lists ₹337.99 crore against O&M in a comparison column, while the department book shows ₹337.99 crore as the 2024–25 revised estimate and ₹100 crore set as the 2025–26 budget estimate. If there is a crunch, it is in how much was provided and how fast it is released, not in pretending the line item vanished.
The 2026–27 “Budget in Brief” does not break out a fresh O&M figure; until the full demand is published, the live questions are adequacy, releases and response times — the things a government that means to keep taps running answers with numbers, not slogans. The Congress runs the state; it can publish the outage data, repair backlogs and release schedules tomorrow. It hasn’t bothered yet.