As the irrigation scam continues to trouble ministers from the previous Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government in Maharashtra,

The Centre’s decision to allocate more money to speed up the construction of Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Program (AIBP) dams has come under scanner of activists and researchers in the field.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitly announced a Rs 17,000 crore sanction for the next fiscal (and 86,500 Crores in the next five years) to complete work on 23 Priority I projects. There are 149 AIBP projects across the country, 89 of which are active. 46 have been prioritised in the Budget: 23 as Priority I, to be completed by FY 2016-17; 23 Priority II, to be completed by FY19-20. Seven of the Priority I projects are in Maharashtra, the highest in any state, with another six are Priority II. This means the State will get larger share of the allotted money to complete its projects.

But some of these are already under investigation for dubious financial spending.

Parineeta Dandekar and Himanshu Thakkar of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) have come released a fact-checking report, Farmers, Rivers and the Environment in Union Budget 2016-17. “If Large Dam approach delivered all that it promised, then Maharashtra, with the largest number of large dams in the country would have had the highest irrigated area. The actual picture is the opposite. Maharashtra has the lowest irrigated area in the country at about 18%,” the report said.

Ms Dandekar told The Hindu , “The name ‘Accelerated Irrigation Benefit’ is ironic: many of these projects have been going on for over two to three decades, have seen huge costs escalations, corruption charges, question marks about their viability, desirability, optimality, quality and final effectiveness.”

According to the report, the alleged irrigation scam showed that the complicated, ever-changing plans, faraway offices and opaque funding mechanisms of the large projects meant that local people had no clue about what was happening, letting an ‘unholy nexus’ of bureaucrats, contractors and engineers eat away public funds, without ensuring that irrigation was enhanced. This advocates the need to concentrate more on small-scale water harvesting structures and ensuring people’s participation.

Ms Dandekar asks, “Why are the same projects being pushed in the name of farmers when it is demonstrated in Maharashtra that farmers are not benefiting from them? Maximum allocation of funds for Large Irrigation Projects in the Union Budget is clearly neither convincing nor beneficial to farmers.” The Anti-Corruption Bureau’s inquiry into the irrigation scam is still in progress, and the State has yet not designed its Integrated State Water Plan; new projects can be undertaken only as per the new ISWP.