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

    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

In this Wonderland

I didn’t write anything in the last few days. Nor did I feel any urge to write. I don’t know if this lack of interest to write is what’s called writer’s block. Or is it simple disenchantment with whatever is happening around me? We’re living in a time that offers much, too much, to writers. The whole world looks like a complex plot for a gigantic epic. The line between truth and fiction has disappeared. Mass murders have become no-news. Animals get more compassion than fellow human beings. Even their excreta are venerated! Folk tales are presented as scientific truths while scientific truths are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. When the young generation in Nepal set fire to their Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, they were making an unmistakable statement: that they are sick of their political leaders and their systems. Is there any country whose leaders don’t sicken their citizens? I’m just wondering. Maybe, there are good leaders still left in a few coun...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...