The State government is intent on starting work on the cofferdams of the Polavaram Project despite the directive by the Union Water Resources Department not to go ahead with it till alternatives are found to cut the cost.
The Union Ministry wrote a letter to the National Hydro Power Corporation (NHPC) to explore alternatives like integrating the upstream cofferdam with the Earth-cum-Rock Filled (ECRF) dam and the other alternative of building the ECRF dam to the safe level without a cofferdam in one season.
A copy of the same was sent to the State Department of Water Resources.
The NHPC experts are scheduled to visit the dam site on November 10-11 and take a call on the cofferdam designs.
Completion of the cofferdams, two temporary structures one upstream the dam and another downstream, is crucial to sending water into the Left and Right Main Canals by gravity.
The Andhra Pradesh government has set a target of doing so by June 2018, in time to harness the flood water in the Godavari.
The State government is acting on a cue from the Polavaram Dam Design Review Committee (DDRC) which met under the chairmanship of A.B. Pandya here on Wednesday. Principal Secretary for Water Resources (A.P.) Shashi Bhushan Kumar told The Hindu that work on the downstream cofferdam would be started immediate. “Alignment of the cofferdam will be plotted and then work would begin on the cofferdam itself,” he said.
The work on cofferdam scheduled to begin on November 1 is already delayed. Minister for Water Resources Devineni Umamaheswara Rao said the National Hydro Power Corporation experts would take a call on whether or not the cofferdam should be integrated with the ECRF dam.
Former Superintending Engineer MV Krishna Rao said he had never heard of a dam being constructed without a cofferdam.
The cost of the cofferdam according to a preliminary estimate was ₹350 crore.