By IANS,
Thiruvananthapuram : Kerala Water Resources Minister P.J. Joseph Friday made a call to all national political parties in the country to clearly state their stand on the Mullaperiyar dam issue.
“We want national parties like the Congress, BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) to come out with their stand on the Mullaperiyar dam… that has now become a threat. The parliament should discuss this issue,” said Joseph.
Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been at loggerhead over the Mullaperiyar dam built under an agreement signed in 1886 between the then Maharaja of Travancore and the erstwhile British administration.
While the dam is located in Kerala’s Idukki district, its waters serve Tamil Nadu. In recent years, Tamil Nadu has demanded that Mullaperiyar’s storage capacity be increased by raising the dam height from 136 feet (41.5 m) to 142 feet (43 m) to meet the increasing demand of water for irrigation.
“In the past four months, 20 tremors have rocked Idukki. A team of experts from IIT-Roorkie (Indian Institute of Technology) has said if a quake measuring 6 on the Richter scale takes place, then the dam will not survive and three million people living in and around the district would be gone,” said Joseph.
Joseph, who hails from Idukki, has in the past few weeks made many a passionate plea to the centre to find a solution to the issue. He will again be going to New Delhi Monday to meet the central leaders on the issue.
While Kerala has been demanding a new dam, which it has offered to build and fund by itself, Tamil Nadu has been vehemently opposed to the idea. To break the deadlock, the Supreme Court earlier this year set up a high-level empowered committee to go into all issues, including the safety aspects, of the dam.
“We have made it clear that we will build a new dam and will go on with the present water-sharing agreement with Tamil Nadu. The parties in Tamil Nadu are worried, but they don’t need to because we still honour the agreement from the Shiruvani dam which provides water to places in and around Coimbatore,” said Joseph.