Mullaperiyar: A Plea for Sanity Ramaswamy R Iyer

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Mullaperiyar: A Plea for Sanity

Ramaswamy R Iyer

The safety of the Mullaperiyar 

dam is not a matter for judicial 

determination. This dispute is 

eminently a case for an agreed 

settlement by amicable talks 

between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. 

Talks at the intergovernmental 

level must be supplemented by 

civil society moves to bring the 

people concerned in the two 

states together. 

T

he Mullaperiyar issue has flared 

up again, presumably because the 

empowered committee is likely to 

submit its report shortly, and the Supreme 

Court may make a pronouncement. Feel­

ings are running high in both Tamil Nadu 

and Kerala. Pleas for sanity may well 

fall on deaf ears, but must nevertheless 

be made. 

An account of the dispute and its his­

tory was published in this journal earlier 

("Towards Good Sense on Mullaperiyar", 

6 January 2007). Without going over the 

entire ground again, the issue can be suc­

cinctly stated as follows. Tamil Nadu wants 

the flows (from the dam to the beneficiary 

area in the Vaigai basin) to be maintained 

and increased, and for this purpose it 

wants the water level in the Mullaperiyar 

reservoir to be raised to the design level of 

142 ft. Kerala is worried about the safety of 

the old dam, in particular from the point of 

view of the people living downstream of 

the dam, and wants the water level not to 

be raised above 136 ft, and if possible to be 

reduced to a lower level. 

Issue of Safety

Thus, the issue now is the safety of the 

dam, or so it appears on the surface, 

though under it lies a deep, long­standing 

sense of grievance in Kerala over the 1886 

agreement between the Madras Presidency 

and the princely state of Travancore. 

Leaving that history aside for the time 

being, and confining ourselves to the 

question of dam safety, it is unfortunate 

that the Supreme Court has allowed itself 

to be embroiled in it. Dam safety is not a 

matter for judicial determination. One 

wishes that the Supreme Court had asked 

the two state governments to resolve the 

issue themselves by mutual agreement, or 

directed the Inter­State Council, a consti­

tutional body, to intervene and bring 

about a settlement. Instead, the Supreme 

Court has not merely taken up the matter, 

but has performed the executive function 

of setting up an empowered expert com­

mittee, whose report is now awaited. 

However, leaving the role of the judici­

ary aside, let us consider the crucial issue. 

We are talking about a dam that is 115 

years old. Even if the empowered commit­

tee pronounces the dam safe, the fears of 

the people living downstream of the dam 

and exposed to the risk of its failure may 

not be wholly set at rest. Those fears get 

accentuated by the occurrence of tremors 

in the area, even if these be of relatively 

small magnitudes. There have been so 

many reports of earthquakes in various 

parts of the world that a general sense 

of nervousness is understandable. The 

right attitude to these fears is not to 

belittle them or question their genuine­

ness but to pay due regard to them and 

allay them. The point that while the bene­

fits of the project go predominantly to 

people in Tamil Nadu, the risks are borne 

entirely by people in Kerala, is also not 

without force.

Minimisation of Risk

A dam that is 115 years old must be pre­

sumed to be nearing the end of its useful 

life. Perhaps it can be kept going for some 

more years by some strengthening meas­

ures, but for how long? Is it not time to 

start preparing for a planned phasing out 

of the dam? Meanwhile, it seems wise to 

avoid unnecessary risk, even at the cost of 

being overcautious. If ever there was a 

case for the invocation of the Precaution­

ary Principle, this is clearly one. 

Should a new dam be built in replace­

ment of the existing one, as proposed by 

Kerala? The answer, in this writer's view, 

should be clearly "No". The existing 

project itself was a horrendous interven­

tion in Nature of a kind that would hardly 

receive environmental clearance today. If 

this were a new project now coming up for 

approval, it seems very probable that it 

would have met the same fate as the Silent 

Valley Project. However, it exists and we 

have to live with it; but there is no reason 

why the folly of more than a century ago 

must now be repeated through the build­

ing of a new dam.

What follows? The answer is that the 

existing dam must be strengthened through COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW december 17, 2011 vol xlvI no 51 13

any measures that the empowered com­

mittee may recommend, and must be safely 

operated with a view to the minimisation 

of risk. That may require the water storage 

to be kept at an appropriate level, what­

ever that may be. 

Extent of Adjustment

To what extent will that affect the eco­

nomic activities and the related prosperity 

in the beneficiary areas in Tamil Nadu? 

That question may be answered through a 

counter question: is water use in the rele­

vant areas in Tamil Nadu at the optimum 

level of efficiency, with no possibility of 

improvement? Is it not possible to main­

tain the existing level of economic activity 

with less water? Is it feasible to change to 

less water­demanding activities? Assum­

ing that some supplementing of Mullaper­

iyar waters is needed, are there possibili­

ties, and have these been studied? It is not 

clear whether any work has been done on 

these matters. 

Consider the riparian dispute over 

Cauvery waters (though the Mullaperiyar 

dispute is not a riparian one). Tamil Nadu, 

which has a history of irrigated agricul­

ture based on Cauvery waters going back 

to Chola times, has had to adjust itself 

to reduced flows in the river because of 

inevitable upstream development over the 

years. The argument now is about the 

extent of adjustment. Is it entirely unrea­

sonable to expect a similar process of 

adjustment in the areas benefiting from 

the ageing Mullaperiyar project?

Going beyond the Cauvery case, the gen­

eral prospect in the country is one of in­

creasing pressure on a finite resource, and 

all water users, whatever the nature of their 

use and whatever the source of their water, 

will have to learn to manage with less water 

and get more use out of it. Even without ref­

erence to the state of the Mullaperiyar dam, 

the people in the Vaigai basin will have to 

make a similar effort. Such an effort will 

ipso facto diminish their dependence on 

Mullaperiyar waters. (To cite an inter­

national example, Singapore is trying 

to reduce its dependence on water from 

Malaysia and become self­sufficient in water 

through a variety of measures.) 

None of the cases cited is an exact par­

allel to the Mullaperiyar­Vaigai case, but 

they are illustrative of the possibilities of 

adjustment to changing circumstances.

This dispute is eminently a case for an 

agreed settlement by amicable talks bet­

ween the two states. Talks at the inter­

governmental level must be supplemented 

by civil society moves to bring the people 

concerned in the two states together, on the 

lines of the "Cauvery Family" initiative. In 

the talks, both at the governmental and non­

governmental levels, efforts will also have to 

be made to remove the strong and continu­

ing sense of grievance in Kerala over the 

1886 agreement, to which a reference was 

made earlier. The conflict between the two 

states cannot be fully resolved without some 

attempt to assuage that grievance