Mullaperiyar: Missing the Point

R Seenivasan’s article (“Historical Validity of Mullaperiyar Project”, EPW, 25 January 2014) on the Mullaperiyar Project, hereafter MP, is a scholarly, well-researched, informative piece of historical writing. Regrettably, he seems to have failed to understand the thrust of my criticisms of the project. When a critic says that the project was an unnecessary and indefensible onslaught on nature, it is no answer to argue that it represented the best engineering. Given a purely engineering perspective, the project might well have seemed very good in the 1890s. However, that perspective ceased long ago to be unquestioningly accepted.

Seenivasan questions my remarks about hubristic engineering, and about rivers being treated as no more than pipelines to be turned, cut and welded. What are the undisputed facts in this case? The waters of a west-flowing river were substantially turned eastwards, made to flow through a 5,700 ft-long tunnel, and led into the Vaigai. Was my description, cited disapprovingly by Seenivasan, inappropriate for such a project?

Seenivasan may contend that MP was a well-studied project, but environmental/ecological concerns could not possibly have been part of that study. The word “ecology”, coined in 1866, was still a neologism and had not gained currency when the dam was built. The Environment Protection Act came into being in this country in 1986, and procedures such as Environmental Impact Assessments came into use a bit later. We cannot now know what harmful environmental impact, if any, the project might have had, because no such study was required to be undertaken in the 1890s; this was what I had said earlier, and I would reiterate it.

I had posed a hypothetical question: if this inter-basin, long-distance-water-transfer project, with the kind of intervention in pristine forests and mountains and the disruption of the lives of wildlife that it envisaged, were to come up today for approval, would it be cleared? Would a climate of opinion that rejected the Silent Valley Project have accepted this project? Very unlikely, I think.

Were Alternatives Considered?

I am convinced that the adjective “horrendous” to describe this intervention in nature was wholly warranted. Why was it undertaken? The purpose was to provide irrigation water to some areas in Tamil Nadu (former Madras Presidency). Seenivasan disputes my statement that alternatives were not considered. Was it the practice at the time to proceed from an identification of a certain need to the tentative formulation of a number of options for meeting that need and then an assessment of those options, finally leading to a choice of a particular course? Is it the established practice even now?

Let us ask ourselves whether bringing water from the Periyar through a mighty feat of engineering was the only answer to the problems of the water-short Vaigai Basin. Was local water-harvesting and conservation not a possible means of promoting and sustaining livelihoods in this area? The point is that given the hold that dams came in the 20th century to acquire over people’s thinking, other possibilities were perhaps not seriously explored, despite the history of tank-irrigation elsewhere in the province/state.

Should “development” take the same water-intensive form everywhere, regardless of differences in the endowment of natural resources?¹ In a water-short area like the Vaigai Basin, was it right to estimate “water need” on the basis of agriculture of the kind appropriate for the Cauvery Basin, and then try to bring that water from wherever it could be found? Should not agriculture of a different, less water-demanding kind, or alternatively, development of a different kind altogether, have been considered?

Today, the MP dam, almost 120 years old, is slowly nearing the end of its useful life. Should we not be exploring other options for the Vaigai Basin? Rajendra Singh has shown what can be done through local initiatives in Rajasthan. Is the replacement of water from the ageing MP dam by such local water-harvesting/conservation initiatives being seriously considered? The annual precipitation in the Vaigai Basin varies from around 1,200 mm at one end to around 600 mm at the other, averaging roughly 650-700 mm over the basin as a whole, which may be lower than the state average of 1,000 mm, but is by no means insignificant.² If local water-harvesting and conservation is feasible in areas such as the Alwar district of Rajasthan or the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra with an annual precipitation of around 500 mm or less,³ it should surely be worth considering for the Vaigai Basin.

In conclusion, let me state categorically that having read Seenivasan’s article, I stand by every word of my criticisms of the project. As an instance of egregious intervention in nature to meet an unsustainable “demand”, MP has parallels elsewhere in India and abroad: the Inter-Linking of Rivers project in India; the diversion of Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in the former Soviet Union, leading to the near death of the Aral Sea; the Three Gorges Project in China (about which there is much criticism even in that country); the history of massive river diversions (a combination of technological hubris and pre­datory capitalism) for the “development” of the American west;⁴ the constraining of the mighty Mississippi by levees for the protection of various areas, particularly New Orleans, and the destruction caused by the catastrophic floods of 1927;⁵ and so on. Perhaps Seenivasan could consider writing scholarly articles establishing the historical validity of all these projects.