Medininagar (Jharkhand), Feb 10 (PTI) Jharkhand Chief Minister Champai Soren on Saturday laid the foundation stone for an irrigation project worth Rs 456.62 crore, which will benefit the people of 96 villages in Palamu district.
Addressing a gathering at Shivaji ground in Daltonganj, Soren said the Palamu region is a rain shadow area, and the project will help meet water demand in the district.
“Earlier governments in the state were aware of the fact that the Palamu region is a rain shadow zone but no one has worked for a concrete solution for irrigation and drinking water for the people in the area,” he said.
The Palamu Pipeline Irrigation project aims at bringing water from three rivers of the district through underground pipelines to feed various reservoirs to meet the demand for drinking and irrigation, Soren said.
The project, which is expected to be completed in two years, will benefit the people of 96 villages in Chainpur, Medininagar, Satbarwa, Vishrampur, Chhatarpur, Hussainabad, Hydernagar, Mohammadganj blocks.
Speaking on the long-pending North-Koel Reservoir project, Soren said, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for the revival of the project on January 5, 2019 and promised that it would be completed soon. But it is yet to be done,” he said.
The North-Koel project aims at providing water for irrigation in 1.11 lakh hectares of land, including 91,000 hectares in Bihar, had been started in 1972. But it was stopped by the forest department of then undivided Bihar in 1993.
Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in 2000.
The central government had, in August 2017, given the go-ahead to complete the remaining work of the project. PTI CORR SAN SAN BDC
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