Replying to a question in the Assembly, the minister said ``There is no question of granting any concessions to those farmers who have drawn water in blatant violation of the rules laid down by the Irrigation department and the statutory corporations. However, the alliance government is sympathetic towards honest and genuine farmers.''

Khadse said his department has to recover Rs 455 crore--Rs 175 crore from the farmers and Rs 280 crore from industrial houses using water from the irrigation projects.

Khadse assured his government will not hesitate to write off the interest and penalty on farmers who were drawing water as per the norms prescribed by the department. ``In such cases, we will not disconnect their water supply,'' he said.

Later, replying to the debate on the budgetary demands of the irrigation department, Khadse said the pace of work on the KrishnaValley project has been five times than that under the previous Congress regime.

In merely three years, between 1995 and 1998, the government, through the Krishna Valley Development Corporation, was able to complete a total of over 300 projects in the valley, he said. Nearly 3.5 lakh hectares of land was brought under irrigation in the last three years while successive Congress governments, over decades, had managed to irrigate only 10 lakh hectares, Khadse told the House.

Setting up corporations like the Krishna Valley and the Godavari has helped a great deal in speeding up irrigation projects, he said. He denied the Congress suggestion that the Godavari Corporation was starved of funds and claimed that there were enough resources for the planned projects.

However, Khadse did appeal to the Congress not to politicise the Krishna projects issue saying that the cash-rich apex state cooperative bank -- which incidentally is under the Congress control -- should part with money for the projects. ``I seenothing wrong in meeting Sharad Pawar or Ajitdada Pawar to sort this out,'' he said in response to the Congress members' suggestion that the government was forced to come to the Congress doorstep for funds.

Earlier, Jayant Patil of the Congress opened the debate and said that the Corporation had raised money at a rate higher than the then prevailing market rates and Gopinath Munde, who was then in charge of irrigation portfolio too, had committed ``financial rape'' on the state with his schemes for raising resources. Cost escalation has now raised the project cost to nearly Rs 10,000 crore from the Rs 7100 crore, Patil said.

Other MLAs like Tejaswini Jadhav and Mohan Patil complained that the state government's emphasis on the Krishna projects had meant a downscaling in the attention and resources to irrigation projects in the rest of the state.