Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today sought the personal intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for approving the Rs 3,277.57 crore master plan to tackle the water-logging problem in the state permanently.
In a letter to Singh, the Chief Minister said unless immediate steps were taken, vast areas of Punjab would turn into waste-land depriving a large population of their primary source of income through agriculture, an official spokesman said.
This would be nothing less than a human catastrophe, the Chief Minister said, seeking release of grants for the project.
The Punjab assembly had recently passed a resolution seeking funds from the Centre in this regard.
The Chief Minister said the problem had aggravated after the unprecedented rains during the recent monsoon.
He told the PM that officials and ministers of the Centre had visited the affected areas, and an expert committee headed by his Technical Advisor Major General (Retd) B S Dhaliwal had surveyed and submitted a master plan to solve the problem.
Badal also told Singh that he had twice sought to update him on the problem but their meeting could not materialise due to the latter's "prior engagements".
