Farmers of Palnadu are at their wits’ end with successive droughts haunting the region and releases from the Nagarjuna Sagar reservoir coming down.

The situation will improve only if the Varekipudisela Lift Irrigation Project, conceived way back in 1952, at Jendapenta thanda in Veldurthy mandal in the Nallamalla hill range, about 150 km from here, is completed.

The State government’s decision to conduct a fresh survey has revived the farmers’ hopes.

The LI scheme, on completion, will serve an ayacut of 55,000 acres spread across the mandals of Durgi, Bollapalli, Veldurthy and Pullalacheruvu in Guntur and Prakasam districts. Building a lift scheme sand-witched between hills is no mean task, and for the farmers of upper Palnadu, the project is the only lifeline.

The project envisages lifting water from the Krishna at Jendapenta Thanda and impounding it at Vajralapadu. Water can then be diverted through pipelines to villages in the four mandals.

Foundation stones have been laid by successive Chief Ministers. N. Chandrababu Naidu laid it at Sirigiripadu village in Veldurthy mandal in 1996 but the project could not take off due to objections from the Forest Department. Two minor irrigation projects at Jerrivagu and Veeraswamy Temple were proposed but they were of little help.

In 2008, the then Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy laid the foundation stone at Gangalakunta and in September 2017, Mr. Naidu again laid the foundation stone for the Anupu-Koppunuru project at Nagarjuna Sagar.

The main bottleneck for grounding the project is acquisition of forest land where a 7.5 km-long pipeline is to be laid. Another area of concern is project cost, which now stands at about ₹1,250 crore, according to the Irrigation Department.

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