Polavaram at 76 per cent: the dam that has outlasted four governments
Two decades in, Andhra Pradesh's largest irrigation project is being rebuilt from a wall that failed. The stated deadline is October 2026; the working assumption is July 2027.
The Polavaram multipurpose project on the Godavari has been under construction for roughly twenty years. It has survived a state bifurcation, four chief ministers, repeated cost revisions and a flood that damaged the structure meant to hold everything else up. It is now about 76.79 per cent complete.
The number that governs the rest of the schedule is not the headline percentage. It is the diaphragm wall.
The wall that had to be built twice
A diaphragm wall is the buried concrete curtain that stops water from seeping beneath a dam. Polavaram’s original wall was damaged during floods, and the project has spent recent years not advancing but repairing — reconstructing the wall at a cost of around ₹900 crore.
Completion targets for that reconstruction have moved more than once, from December 2025 to a February and then March 2026 window, with work having begun in January 2025. IIT-Hyderabad has been involved in site assessment, an indication that the engineering questions were treated as genuinely open rather than settled.
Rebuilding a foundation element on a nearly-complete dam is among the least forgiving tasks in civil engineering. Everything downstream of it in the schedule waits.
Two deadlines
Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has set October 2026 as the completion target and has said publicly the project will be finished by 2027 “at any cost.” Assessments based on the observed rate of progress put major works completion at July 2027.
The distance between those two dates is not evasion so much as the ordinary difference between a target set to drive urgency and a projection derived from throughput. Both are on the record. Only one has historically held.
Why it matters beyond the reservoir
Polavaram is not only an irrigation project. It anchors the state’s water strategy — including the proposed Godavari–Banakacherla link, which depends on Polavaram’s headworks to move surplus Godavari water toward Rayalaseema. A delay at Polavaram is therefore a delay in a chain of projects that the government has already begun to plan around.
It also carries a human cost that the completion percentage does not capture. Submergence displaces tribal communities across the Godavari’s upper reaches, and rehabilitation has consistently lagged construction — a pattern that has drawn objections from Odisha and Chhattisgarh as well as from those directly affected.
The pattern to watch
Polavaram’s history is one of deadlines announced with confidence and revised quietly. The useful test is not whether October 2026 is met — few close observers expect it — but whether the July 2027 projection holds through the next monsoon.
A dam is unusually honest about time. The Godavari floods every year, and every flood season is either absorbed by a completed structure or endured by an incomplete one.