Skip to main content

Mullaperiyar Dam and the Threat

Russell Joy speaking at the seminar at Vazhakulam


I spent the weekend evening listening to a lecture on the threat posed to the state of Kerala by the Mullaperiyar dam. The speaker was Advocate Russell Joy, one who has been crusading for quite a while for the decommissioning of the dam. Recently he got a court order to maintain the water level in the dam at 139 feet instead of 142 as stubbornly demanded by Tamil Nadu.

What precisely are the problems caused by the dam? How did these problems arise? I was curious to know and was happy to listen to Advocate Joy who has become quite an authority on the subject because of the relentless research he has done.

First of all, the dam’s lifespan was 50 years, says the advocate. The engineer who designed it had declared that. The dam was repaired by Tamil Nadu and some support structures were added. Such a support is no guarantee whatever. The dam may give way at any time.

During the recent deluge that engulfed Kerala, Tamil Nadu disregarded the court injunction about the water level and allowed the water in the dam to rise to 145 feet. It was done just to “prove” to Kerala as well as others that the dam was strong enough to hold the water. Joy says that Tamil Nadu was terribly insensitive and callous to do that, however. In fact, the letter written by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister in response to his Kerala counterpart’s request to lower the water level was a mockery of a people who were grappling with a catastrophe.

Secondly, the contract which awards the Mullaperiyar waters to Tamil Nadu is not legally tenable. It was a contract signed between the King of Travancore and the British government in the 19th century. Advocate Joy managed to get a copy of that contract with much difficulty and more luck. The contract was yet another instance of the typical British skulduggery. The Travancore King was dragooned into signing it. The real motive was not supplying water to areas of Tamil Nadu but plunder the wealth in the verdant forests of the area.

The day India became independent the Travancore King declared the contract invalid. All contracts signed between Indian kings and the British became automatically invalid when India became independent. Yet this one contract, the Mullaperiyar one, continued to be in force!

What is really incredible is that this contract was signed for 999 years while all other such contracts between the British and the Indian kings were signed for 99 years. In 1970 the Kerala government with uncommon magnanimity renewed that contract. Advocate Joy asserts bluntly that a few politicians of Kerala sold the people of their own state for personal aggrandisement. Many of these politicians received due benefits from the Tamil Nadu government in the form of land or resorts or money in exchange for the renewal of the Mullaperiyar contract. J Jayalalithaa herself had hinted about this once, he says.

Joy is fighting a case in the court all on his own. He wants an expert international team [international, because there are no such experts in India] to examine the safety of the dam. “This is a matter that involves the lives of millions of people,” he says. The flippancy with which both Kerala and Tamil Nadu governments have dealt with it so far is unpardonable. Joy is certain that an expert team will recommend nothing less than the decommissioning of the dam.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 30, 2018 at 7:28 AM

    Thanks for providing an usefull info.i was not able to attend the class.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathNovember 2, 2018 at 6:51 AM

    Very informative post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
13 comments
Read more