Anxiety is growing in Kerala among the people living in the downstream areas of the 118-year-old Mullaperiyar dam situated on the State’s border with Tamil Nadu as the water level in the reservoir is slowly rising above the crucial 136-feet mark, something that has not been allowed to happen in the past 34 years.
Reports from Mullaperiyar on Tuesday morning said that the dam water level had crossed the 139-feet mark as Tamil Nadu, which controls the dam and draws the entire water of the reservoir as per an 1886 agreement, is determined to let it rise to touch the 142-feet mark, after it was granted permission to do so by the Supreme Court on May 7.
Kerala believes that the dam, constructed 118 years ago with the technology and materials available at that time, is not strong enough to withstand the pressure of so much water. It fears that a breach in the dam under the pressure of such immense volume of water might wipe away everything in four of its districts and lead to loss of lives of over three million people.
Tamil Nadu, whose five southwestern districts are dependent on the Mullaperiyar water for their agriculture, is allowing the reservoir water level to rise by drawing only 456 cubic feet per second while it can draw up to 1,400 cu feet, in order to convince the supervisory committee appointed by the apex court that the dam is strong enough to contain water up 142 feet and more.
Surprisingly, the politicians of Kerala are not showing the urgency and ferocity with which they had unleashed a campaign against Tamil Nadu when dam water level had risen to dangerous levels in 2011. The response of the Kerala Government has been limited to giving a call for an urgent meeting of the dam supervisory committee.
“As far as we are concerned, this dam is a source of perpetual fear and anxiety. We simply know that the dam is not strong or safe. No dam can be safe after so many years. But our political leaders are perhaps more concerned with issues of bars and bribes than those concerning the lives of so many people,” said Pappachan, a resident of Vallakkadavu, a village near the dam.
It was Water Resources Minister PJ Joseph and other leaders Kerala Congress (M) - which is now trapped in a bribe charge against its chairman KM Mani - who had led the campaign in 2011 over the demand for a new dam to replace the existing one. “Joseph had then said he was unable to sleep because of fears about the old dam. Can he sleep nowIJ” asked Pappachan.
The anxiety of the people living in Vallakkadavu and other villages downstream from the dam has escalated also due to the leaks found on the outer wall of the dam at 130 feet. Tamil Nadu is arguing that this is not a leak of reservoir water but a simple seepage of the rain water trapped between the dam and the wall. But experts say that the leak is continuing though there is no rain.
As per a pact signed in 1886 between the then Madras Government of the British Raj and Maharaja of Travancore, (today’s) Tamil Nadu could draw the entire water contained in an 8,000-acre reservoir by the Mullaperiyar dam for 999 years by paying Rs 40,000 per year to Kerala. This lease fee was raised to Rs 30 per acre in 1970 when the agreement was renewed.
Kerala and Tamil Nadu had fought a protracted legal war over the dam which culminated in the Supreme Court verdict of May 7 which granted almost all that Chennai had been asking for. The Kerala Government is yet to come to a definite decision as to what its next legal steps should be.