Fifteen days at the protest tent, still waiting for a canal notification

Farmers at Parchur in Bapatla district completed the fifteenth day of a relay hunger strike on Sunday, August 30, demanding that the government issue the land-acquisition notification needed to advance the proposed extension of the Guntur Channel toward the Parchur area.

The protest is built around a practical grievance: cultivators say the channel extension is needed for irrigation as well as drinking-water security, but the project cannot move through the required corridor until the land process is formally advanced. Nallamada Rythu Sangham president Dr Kolla Rajamohan, speaking at the protest, called for the notification to be issued and said the agitation would continue until the demand was addressed.

Earlier project records cited in local reporting show that the channel extension has been discussed for years. Administrative approval was reported in 2019 and a technical sanction of ₹274.53 crore was cited in later project coverage. Those older figures provide background, not evidence that the remaining work has now been funded or tendered. Sunday’s protest specifically concerned the missing land-acquisition step and the farmers’ demand for water.

That distinction is important. Large irrigation projects often accumulate approvals, estimates and announcements long before a farmer sees water in a field. Each administrative stage can become a bottleneck, and land acquisition is particularly difficult because it requires notification, valuation, compensation and possession before civil works can proceed across private holdings.

The relay format also shows that the Parchur protest is no longer a one-day representation. Farmers have maintained the action for more than two weeks, rotating participants rather than treating the demand as a symbolic gathering. The continuation raises a simple question for the administration: what exact step is pending, and which authority is responsible for completing it?

A useful government response would therefore need more than a general assurance. It should specify the present status of the land proposal, the area to be acquired, the funding available for compensation, the office handling the notification and a realistic timeline for the next statutory step.

The local report does not establish that the entire channel project is ready to begin immediately once a notification is issued. Engineering, funding and construction stages may still remain. But without the land process, those later stages cannot meaningfully advance through the affected reaches.

Sunday’s fifteenth day of protest keeps the focus on that missing link. For Parchur farmers, the argument is not about an abstract canal line on a plan; it is about whether a long-discussed extension moves from files and sanctions to land, works and eventually water.