The thriller over the “mega” Kaleshwaram Carry Irrigation Scheme has additional deepened with an inquiry fee, headed by a jurist who served as a excessive court docket chief justice and a Supreme Court docket choose, failing to observe the fundamental however necessary procedures — as identified by the Telangana excessive court docket in its current judgment — which might be prescribed within the Fee of Inquiry Act 1952 underneath which the fee was constituted.

Although the excessive court docket upheld the structure of the fee, it declared the fee’s “adversarial findings towards petitioners — former chief minister Okay. Chandrashekar Rao, former irrigation minister T. Harish Rao and two different senior bureaucrats — are “legally unsustainable and inoperative” due to the procedural lapse.

Gross negligence, irregularities and lacunae in planning, designing, setting up, awarding, and executing the contract, operation and upkeep — which kind a part of the phrases of reference of the fee — wouldn’t have seen the sunshine however for the sinking of the Medigadda barrage, one of many three barrages in KLIS, simply earlier than the 2023 elections.

Its venture price was initially projected at Rs 80,000 crore however is more likely to exceed Rs 1.47 lakh crore, and the Comptroller and Auditor Basic of India established undue funds of 1000’s of crores of rupees to contractors. The Nationwide Dam Security Company pointed to design deficiencies, and the Ghose Fee’s findings — which the excessive court docket declared as unsustainable and inoperative — held Chandrashekar Rao and Harish Rao chargeable for web site choice and design.

It’s past doubt that procedural and monetary irregularities did happen, and the Congress, after forming the federal government, anticipated to take political benefit by punishing the culprits. Nevertheless, its intent seems to have been diluted when the federal government restricted the probe to 3 barrages, leaving one other main element of the KLIS — the pump home — out of its purview. It additionally tried to nook the third participant within the state — the BJP — by preferring a CBI probe as a substitute of its personal investigation.

Now, with procedural lapses of the Ghose Fee clouding the probe, the CBI probe stays the one means the case might be dropped at a logical conclusion — one thing that the BJP is more likely to hold in chilly storage for utilizing it for political leverage at an applicable time.