The Gujarat government today informed the state Legislative Assembly that the work of installing all the 30 gates on the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river has been completed.
Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel made this announcement during his address on the budgetary demands for the Sardar Sarovar Project, which comprises the dam and canal network.
Patel expressed confidence that the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) would soon grant permission to close the gates following a recent order by the Supreme Court asking the project-affected families to vacate the land.
"NCA gave us permission to install the gates in June 2014 with a condition that we cannot close them. At present, we have completed the work of installing all the 30 gates. The remaining civil work would be completed by the end of March 2017," Patel said in his opening remark.
"The apex court made it clear that the affected families need to vacate the land by August (2017). Hence, we are hopeful to get permission from NCA to close the gates. If everything goes as per the plan, we would start our work to close the gates by July this year," said Patel.
Last month, the Supreme Court had directed the Gujarat government to pay Rs 400 crore to Madhya Pradesh for disbursal among 600 affected families as compensation towards the loss of their land due to the dam project.
In his address, Patel informed the House that the current storage capacity of the dam with height of 121.92 meters, stands at 1.27 million acre feet. Once the gates are closed and the height reaches 138.72 meters, the dam would be able to store 4.73 million acre feet.
"In this year's Budget, we have allocated Rs 235 crore for the construction work at the dam and Rs 4,921 crore for the construction of 3,218 km of canals. So far, we have built canals with cumulative length of 45,095 km out of the total 71,748 km. The remaining network of canals would be completed in the next two years," Patel said.
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