Daijiworld Media Network - Mangaluru (SP)

Mangaluru, Apr 14: Yettinahole project, which is expected to provide clean drinking water to parched areas of Bengaluru rural, Kolar and Chikkaballapur districts, continues to attract lot of attention at the election in Chikkaballapur Lok Sabha constituency, where former chief minister, M Veerappa Moily of the Congress, has locked horns in direct fight with Bachche Gowda of the BJP. In the previous election, as Kumaraswamy too had entered the fray and Vokkaliga votes had got divided, Moily had won with a slender margin.

Moily and Bachche Gowda have been speaking about the project and taking credit for it. Bachche Gowa has pointed out that the project was approved when BJP's Sadananda Gowda was the chief minister while Moily says he was the brain behind it. While Moily says that the project will be completed and water would be supplied to his Lok Sabha constituency, Bachche Gowda says that so far, thousands of crores of rupees have been spent on this project, and nothing other than stacking of pipes has happened.

M Veerappa Moily

Sometime back, people from the coastal districts of Karnataka and Hassan were up in arms against this project as they felt that ecology of the region would suffer imbalance and water supply to the region would be curtailed. They also were afraid of the consequences of diverting river flow. However, during this Lok Sabha election, this has turned into a non-issue surprisingly.

The fight launched through the National Green Tribunal has not yielded any result, and currently the case is stranded there since the last 18 months because of lack of interest on the part of the tribunal. Because of retirement and resignations of tribunal members, the case was assigned to back burner for some time. Since then it has remained so.

Kishore Kumar from Sakleshpur, ,who has been spearheading fight against the project, points out that because of Yettinahole project works, landslides had occurred at various places and three acres of land had crashed at Hongadahalla and fallen across the stream as a result of which floods had destroyed plantations, agricultural fields etc. He says that if it rains heavily this time, hillocks suffering landslips cannot be ruled out.a

Political parties had taken different stands in the past. While D V Sadananda Gowda and Veerappa Moily had strongly backed the project, some leaders had opposed it. However, no one in positions of power fought against it with commitment as a result of which the Yettinahole project now has been partially executed and no one knows when it will be completed and whether it will be successful.