MULLAIPERIYAR,
“The great many of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”- Adolf Hitler
A damned dam
Needs A Solomon To Adjudicate
By Sam Rajappa
A 116-year-old dam in Peermedu taluk of Idukki district, Kerala, is giving
sleepless nights to the UPA government and the Supreme Court. Constructed by
Major John Pennycuick of the Madras Regiment on an 8,000-odd acre piece of land
in the high ranges given on 999-year-lease to the then Madras Presidency by the
erstwhile Maharaja of Travancore, the 15 tmcft. storage capacity Mullaiperiyar
dam was to divert its waters to the rain-shadow region of Tamil Nadu. The idea
of diverting the Periyar into Madurai
existed for more than 150 years. A small beginning was made in 1850 but was
given up as labourers demanded high wages to work in the malaria-infested
region. The lease agreement was signed on 29 October 1885, and work on the project
was completed in 1895. Ever since, the dam had been under the administrative
control of the Public Works Department of Madras and later the Tamil Nadu
government.
Apart from providing drinking water to the people of Madurai, Theni, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram,
the diverted waters helped irrigate about 70,000 hectares of parched land in
these districts. The Kerala government wants to abrogate the lease
agreement, decommission and dismantle the dam and build a new one half a
kilometer downstream at its cost to ensure uninterrupted water supply to Tamil
Nadu at the existing level.
A 130-page government report says: “There is a limit to the number of years one
can keep dams in service through maintenance and strengthening measures. In the
case of the Mullaiperiyar dam, it has to be there for another 884 years for
diverting water to Tamil Nadu as per the lease deed. This is an
impossible proposition. All over the world, safety of dams are being reviewed
as per modern standards and hundreds of dams have already been dismantled
considering the safety aspects of human life and property.”
Age does not wither a dam. Karikala Chola built Kallanai (Grand Anicut),
the world’s oldest dam, across the Cauvery, south of the temple town of Srirangam in
Tiruchirapali district, in the second century AD. It is still functional and
continues to irrigate about 4,000 sq. km. in the delta region, the granary of
Tamil Nadu. The secret of the longevity of Kallanai is its regular
maintenance. People in the delta are not living in fear of the aged dam
bursting. Sir Arthur Cotton transformed the entire Godavari-Krishna delta into
rich agricultural lands by constructing the Godavari anicut, and Dowleswaram
and Krishna barrages between 1845 and
1855. To get approval for the Godavari anicut, he wrote to the Secretary
of State for India in London,: “My Lord, one day’s flow in the Godavari during
high floods is equal to one whole year’s flow in the Thames.”
All the irrigation structures built by Sir Arthur Cotton are much older than the
Mullaiperiyar dam and are functional. Like the more than 1,900-year-old
Kallanai in Tamil Nadu, the Andhra Pradesh PWD maintains the Godavari and the Krishna dams and no one in coastal Andhra would dream of
demanding decommissioning and dismantling them.
There is a story behind the Kerala government’s demand for demolishing the
Mullaiperiyar dam. It does not like the idea of a neighbouring State having
control over 8,000-odd acres of land in its territory. Having failed in
its attempt to get the 1885 Lease Deed declared null and void through legal
means, it sued for upward revision of lease rents and won. In 1970, the
enlightened Kerala Chief Minister C Achutha Menon renewed the lease agreement
on terms much better than the 1885 ones. He never raised the safety issue
of the dam because he had confidence in the ability of the Tamil Nadu engineers
to protect it. He wanted the fishing rights in the Mullaiperiyar reservoir to
be transferred to Kerala. Tamil Nadu readily agreed. Six years later the
Idukki dam, 30 km downstream of the Mullaiperiyar dam on the Periyar, with a
capacity to store 71 tmcft. water, was completed as a hydroelectric project.
The expectation was the dam would fill to the brim twice in a year, during both
the north-west and the south-east monsoons. That never happened in the first
two years. It was then the late K Karunakaran and engineers of the Kerala
State Electricity Board who came out with the strange idea of creating panic in
Kerala that the Mullaiperiyar dam was in danger of bursting and the lives and
properties of 35 lakh people living in the districts of Idukki, Kottayam,
Alapuzha and Ernakulam were in danger and request the Tamil Nadu government to
perform the obsequies of the dam. It was a clever ploy to kill two birds
with one stone. Idukki would get its fill and the land lease would become
redundant.
It worked in part. The Kerala media excelled in spreading panic among the
people. What began in 1978 in the print media has since spread to the
electronic media and culminated in the release last Friday of Warner Brother’s
English film, Dam 999 directed by Sohan Roy of Kochi at a cost of Rs 50 crore and dubbed in
Malayalam and Tamil. A whole generation of Keralites have been brought up on
the fear of death by drowning. As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “The great
many of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”
Even a seasoned thinker like the retired Supreme Court Judge, VR Krishna Iyer,
could not see through the game. Quoting the Rio de Jeneiro Declaration on
Environment and Development of the UN conference (1992), he wrote in an article
published in a leading daily, “The Central government is duty-bound to save
every Indian’s life. Federalism does not absolve the Centre from failing to
avoid the huge casualties that could be caused by an incident of leakage from
the Mullaiperiyar dam. The due jurisprudence implied in the Rio instruments are
international in impact and it cannot be violated by signatories like India.”
The materials Major Pennycuick used to construct the Mullaiperiyar dam are the
same Karikala Chola used for the Kallanai 1900 years ago: stone and surki. In
1930, Tamil Nadu engineers responsible for its maintenance bored 80 holes in
the dam and injected 40 tonnes of cement solution to plug seepage. Again in
1933, grouting technology was used to strengthen the dam. In 1960, 502 tonnes
of cement solution was injected. All this was done without any outside
prodding. After the scare-mongering in 1978, New Delhi deputed an expert team of the Central
Water Commission to inspect the dam. Though it did not find any fault with the
dam, it recommended temporary lowering of its storage level from 152 ft. to 136
ft., thereby reducing its capacity from 15 tmcft. to just 10 tmcft., to allay
the fears of Kerala. Since then, a reinforced concrete cap was put on the dam
to increase its weight by 12,000 tonnes and cable anchoring was done to
withstand tremors.
In the unlikely event of the dam bursting in spite of all these safety
measures, the entire water will flow into the Idukki dam, 30 km.
downstream. There are no big towns in this short stretch of sparsely
populated forest area. Of the two medium-size towns, Kumuli is located at an
altitude of 3,350 metres and Elapara 4,850 metres above sea level whereas the
Mullaiperiyar reservoir is at an altitude of 2,890 metres. Therefore, the dam
is of no threat to its inhabitants. Kerala’s allegation that the Tamil Nadu
government is indifferent to the lives of Malayalees is a travesty of truth. Eighty
per cent of the people living between the two dams are Tamils. The States
Reorganisation Commission in its report submitted in 1955 found 90 per cent of
the population of Peermedu and Devikulam taluks of present-day Idukki district
was Tamil and recommended its cession to Tamil Nude. K Kamaraj, then Chief
Minister, refused to stake his claim to annex the two taluks. Had he done so,
the present dispute would not have arisen.
After the release of Dam 999, politicians in Kerala have literally gone berserk
as their behaviour in Parliament on Monday reveals. The frequent question they
ask is: Can’t the people of Tamil Nadu recognise the imminent danger 35 lakh
Keralites of central Kerala are exposed to and persuade their government to
decommission the Mullaiperiyar immediately on their generous offer of continued
supply of the Periyar waters from the proposed new dam to be built on Kerala
soil. R Balakrishna Pillai of the Kerala Congress (B), a founding constituent
of the ruling United Democratic Front, once declared in the State Assembly when
he was the irrigation minister, “Kerala will not give a drop of water to Tamil
Nadu.” The entire House applauded. Is it fair on the part of Kerala politicians
to ask Tamil Nadu to give up its only legal hold on the Mullaiperiyar, the 1885
Lease Deed, and dismantle the dam when it poses no threat to
anybody?
The writer is a veteran journalist and former Director of Statesman Print
Journalism School
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