After many hours of successfully taking the waters of Narmada to Modh Kuva, the village at the tail-end of the Kutch Branch Canal, the authorities had to stop the flow after a patch in the path was breached on Thursday.
We have been conducting many testing since the last week, and for the first time, the water reached Modh Kuva late on six July night. The 750 km of water flows from the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the longest site in the country, being a man-made canal.
In one part, the canal created a breach, and we planned to repair it and restart the trials in the next few days. The trial aimed to look out for any problems and identify them instantly. JP Gupta, chairman of Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd, gives the statement.
Kutch Branch Canal is part of the ambitious Sardar Sarovar project, hailed as the country’s largest irrigation project with more than 60,000 km of the canal network. The preliminary investigation reflects that the place where the pipeline was damaged had some issues in the joint area. The ₹6,493 crores Kutch Branch Canal project was to bring 1,02,200 hectares of land into irrigation and provide drinking water to 906 villages in the semi-arid region of Kutch, the country’s largest district.
Six of the seven-branch canals have already been completed and commissioned, providing water to North Gujarat and Saurashtra regions. The work for more than 200 km on Kutch Branch Canal was completed about four years ago, and the remaining stretch was because of problems related to land acquisition, said people acquainted with the development.
The water reached Modh Kuva around 1 am on seven July, four hours before the breach was found at Bidada village, about 315 km from the offtake point, said sources close to the development. The damaged patch on seven July was completed in 2016. The breach was 10 meters deep,” said an official JP Gupta in the know of the matter.
As the Narmada waters began flowing in the villages of Kutch, the villagers cheered, lit the sky with fireworks in celebration and praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for completing the project.