The old energy and expectation are missing among the protesters sitting at the Shamiana a little away from the gravity dam at Mullaperiyar in Kerala’s Idukki district, built with rubble and Surki concrete a century ago, but the protesters demanding safety from the ‘water bomb’ are still clinging to their hope and determination as their agitation enters the 2,500th day on Thursday.
Politicians in Kerala belonging to all parties had raised a lot of hue and cry towards the end of 2011 about the danger of a weak dam holding 11 TMC of water sitting at the top of the
Western Ghats in Kerala but none of them seemed to remember that the agreement which had led to the whole crisis had attained 127 years of age on Tuesday.
Though the issue being loudly discussed presently among the mountains of the Western Ghats is the Madhav Gadgil report which wanted periodic review of safety of dams and decommissioning of unsafe ones, the same ‘seminarists’ (as one protestor put it) have no time to listen to the demand of the people agitating against such a danger for the past 2,500 days.
The Mullaperiyar dam, located in Kerala territory in Idukki district on the border with Tamil Nadu, was commissioned in 1897 on the basis of the agreement signed on October 29, 1886 between the then Madras Government and the king of erstwhile Travancore which entitled today’s Tamil Nadu to draw the entire water of the reservoir for 999 years!
Travancore (now Kerala) was to get an annual lease fee of Rs 40,000 for the 8,000 acres of forest land, the reservoir area. The water of Mullaperiyar has since 1897 been the lifeblood of five districts of southwestern Tamil Nadu and the Tamils cannot even think of that flow getting stopped.
If the dam is the provider of lifeblood for so many Tamil people, Kerala sees it as a permanent threat to the lives of about four million human beings and all kinds of organisms thriving in five districts. “That contradiction is what has thrown the two States into a protracted legal war,” says Babu, a resident of Vallakkadavu, a village below the dam.
The concern is not wholly unreal, he argues. If anything happens to the dam, the entire waters of the reservoir could rush down into the giant Idukki reservoir which, for the moment, seems to have the capacity to contain it. “But if it cannot, the result will be the wiping out of a whole region with everything in it in central Kerala,” says Babu.
Independence and later evolution of politics have not had much impact on the 1886 Mullaperiyar agreement except for a hike in the lease fee as determined by a renewal of it over 40 years ago. The fee of Rs 5 per acre of reservoir land to be given to Kerala was increased to Rs 30 per acre.