Chandigarh
Claiming that the Dadupur-Nalvi canal project had been scrapped in public interest, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today announced the formation of a committee to look into alleged irregularities in the irrigation project conceived in the early 1980s.

Addressing a press conference here today, he said the committee would probe various aspects such as “non-viability” of the project, missing files and alleged siphoning of sand dug from the canal.

About denotificaton of the land acquired for the project, he claimed that the project was not viable. The scheme on which the government had spent more than Rs 300 crore about 10 years ago, for which more than 1,000 acres of fertile land of farmers was acquired, was irrigating only about 300 acres, that too only during the kharif crop.

With the present enhancement amount of Rs 580 crore for 167 acres, the total project cost could go up to about Rs 2,500-3,000 crore. He said the farmers would not be forced to take back the denotified land. Khattar termed the recent Punjab and Haryana High Court verdict as “ajeeb-o-gareeb’’ (strange) in which it ordered enhancement in compensation rate for 167 acres of acquired land, requiring about Rs 580 crore more.

He said a project at an estimated cost of Rs 235 crore had been approved in principle for utilising about 140 cusecs of treated water at 35 locations in 21 districts of the state. The government had a plan to utilise treated water from sewage treatment plants (STPs). One pilot project costing Rs 3.65 crore had been taken up for using treated water from three STPs at Ladwa, Shahbad and Pehowa towns which would benefit farmers of three villages and to irrigate 290 hectares of land by the micro-irrigation system