In response to the White Paper on irrigation over the past decade prepared by Maharashtra’s Water Resources Department, the Aam Aadmi Party has prepared an exhaustive ‘Black Paper’ on the issue.
It would be released by Arvind Kejriwal at Roha on December 2 in Raigad district, political stronghold of irrigation minister Sunil Tatkare.
“The Black Paper has been prepared after studying and analysing data from various sources such as Water Resources Department, Central Water Commission, Directorate of Economics & Statistics, Government of Maharashtra and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development. The findings show that the WRD’s tall claims about the area brought under irrigation are manipulative and entirely contradictory,” a party release said in Mumbai on Thursday.
“This Black Paper exposes the farcical exercise of the WRD’s White Paper and proves how bogus an attempt of face-saving it is, largely on account of coalition political compulsions,” it said.
The black paper illustrates what a genuine white paper on irrigation over the past decade should have ideally been like and the issues that really ought to have been addressed, it said.
It illustrates that the figures relating to the area brought under irrigation, as claimed in the white paper, is a blatant attempt to mislead everyone since the fact that this increase in area brought under irrigation is a result of irrigation due to wells, bore wells, drip irrigation, lift irrigation and not just due to dams and canals for which the WRD has made huge expenditure, the release said.
The most important aspect of the Black Paper is its exposing the modus operandi of how the irrigation scam was perpetuated by the politician-bureaucrat-contractor nexus, it said.
A public rally is scheduled to be held at Roha on December 2 to launch the Maharashtra chapter of the Aam Aadmi Party, it said.