The recent granting of environmental clearance by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has sharpened the divide between villagers of Pottipuram, activists and scientists, with local hostility to the project strengthening
As dusk falls in Chinna Pottipuram village and people return home after grazing cattle, elderly women in the village assemble at the oor manthai (a gathering place) and begin prayers invoking Ambarappar, the eponymous deity of the Ambarappar Hill in Theni district, where the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is proposed to be set up. The prayer, which has now become a daily routine in the village, continues until late in the night and ends in a fervent appeal to Ambarappar to stop the INO project. The ritual is an indication of the near unanimous opposition faced by the project in the villages of Pottipuram panchayat, closely located to the project site.
The project is back in focus, with the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change granting fresh environmental clearance (EC) last month, rekindling opposition from the local people, activists and politicians.
A visit to the area showed that the EC has only increased the locals’ hostility towards the project. “People of my generation are not going to live for long. However, we have the responsibility to protect this village so that the younger generation can sustain their lives here. We will not even allow a single vehicle to enter the village for the project,” says 73-year-old P. Muthilikamu, the headman of T. Pudukottai, the village located closest to the project site, 2 km away.
Mistrust continues to rule the minds of the villagers, with many of them continuing to be unaware of why the present site has been selected for the project — the scientific requirement of tunnelling a high-enough mountain, seismic compatibility of the area, and the near absence of forests that may need to be cleared.
Fresh in their minds
In Pottipuram panchayat, which includes T. Pudukottai, Chinna Pottipuram, T. Ramakrishnapuram, Kuppanasaripatti and Thimminaickenpatti villages, the INO project dominates nearly every discussion. About half of the over 9,000 people in the panchayat are agricultural labourers. A majority of the households has large numbers of cattle, which graze mostly in the Ambarappar hill and adjacent areas.
A stream at the base of the hill runs close to the roughly 27 hectares of poramboke land that is now fenced off for the project, and feeds at least two tanks nearby when it rains. Though an irrigation canal extended to the area in recent years runs half-a-kilometre away from the project site, villagers say that they were yet to see water in it.
The villagers see a spiritual significance to the Ambarappar hill, near the base of which is the small thatched-roof Ambarappar Swami shrine. The foremost fear of the local people seems to be the prospect that the INO will alienate them from the hill that has been an integral part of their lives. “There is no spot on the hill that I have not set foot on. Our children, including girls, go even in the evenings to the hill to graze cattle or pick firewood. All that will stop as the neutrino people will gradually take control of the area,” says Mr. Muthilikamu.
The INO team has assured them that there will be no restriction of movement outside the fenced area and paramilitary forces will not be deployed, but they are not convinced.
Despite the claims of the team that extensive outreach programmes were done around 2010 after finalising Pottipuram as the location, a number of people The Hindu met in these villages claim no one has explained the project to them, which was also evident from the bizarre fears they expressed, besides apprehensions on possible environmental impact and loss of livelihood.
For instance, P. Periyaraj of T. Pudukottai says: “They are going to keep a giant magnet [the 50 kilo tonne Iron Calorimeter detector] inside the mountain. People say that it will attract all the iron tools from our houses.”
The uploading of a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions on the INO website, both in Tamil and English, has not helped much. The public dissemination meeting organised in the 2010 was reportedly attended only by the people of T. Ramakrishnapuram, who claim it was dominated by assurances of developmental prospects for the villages instead of explanation of the project.
The project is also fiercely questioned by activists on various fronts.
Approval process
G. Sundarrajan of Poovulagin Nanbargal, the petitioner in the case in which the NGT kept the EC in abeyance, alleges that the EC granted now by the Ministry was a violation of rules and the NGT’s order. “The Tamil Nadu State Environmental Impact Assessment Agency (TNSEIAA) cites clear reasons, including the risks in the tunnelling, for why the project cannot be assessed under Category B of Section 8 (a) - ‘Buildings and Construction projects’. The NGT order also said the same. Still, the Ministry granted EC under that category,” he says.
“The EC states that ‘Considering the national importance of the proposal, Ministry decided to appraise the proposal at the Central level as a special case’. When you have law, there can be no special cases,” he adds.
The project team, however, has vehemently denied allegations of special treatment. Clarifying in a recent interview to The Hindu that the project clearly fell under Category B of Section 8 (a) as per the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification of 2006 and a subsequent clarification issued to the notification in December 2014, V.M. Datar, Project Director, INO, explains it had to be appraised by the Ministry only because the TNSEIAA did not clear it.
V. Balakrishnan, former Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India, who was associated with the INO project during the selection of the site, says that if TN SEIAA had difficulties in assessing the tunnelling work, they could have always invited experts.
The larger concern environmental activists are raising, however, is the bypassing of a full-fledged Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and public hearing for the project. The Detailed Project Report indicates the use of 450 tonnes of explosives over four years to excavate 6 lakh tonnes of rocks in the Western Ghats for construction of tunnels and caverns. The INO still needs approvals from the National Board for Wildlife and TN Pollution Control Board.
“If the project team wants to be transparent, the first document they must bring out is a proper EIA. Let them place it before the local people in a language they understand and then let the people decide,” says Nityanand Jayaraman, environmental activist.
Taking defence in the law that the EIA and the public hearing were not needed for projects in Category B of Section 8(a), the project team, however, claim that they pro-actively did an Ecological Impact Assessment to assess risk to flora and fauna and to prepare an effective Environment Management Plan.“We also care for the environment. In fact, a key reason for zeroing in on Pottipuram is the negligible impact to the environment.
No forest land over ground will be used. The 4.62 hectares of land from the Forest department is only for the tunnels and caverns and there will be no disturbance on the surface once construction is over. The remaining 27 hectares is revenue poramboke with thorny bushes and not a single tree had to be cut,” says D. Indumathi, Professor, Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), and a collaborator in the project. The Ecological Impact Assessment and the DPR collectively address concerns about the impact to the environment and blasting.
Activists say this is insufficient. “When many recent studies have talked about human-induced earthquakes, particularly due to mining and reservoir-induced seismicity, a thorough study on blasting is needed,” Mr. Sundarrajan says.
Many of these studies provide no conclusive evidence on earthquakes being human-induced, says Mr. Balakrishnan. He adds that the possibility of human-induced seismicity can be safely ruled out at the proposed INO site as it fell under Seismic Zone II — the safest in India. He adds that concerns about blasting at the site causing structural damage to Idukki and Mullaperiyar dams in Kerala, which are more than 30 km away, and affecting ground water table, were unfounded.
“In all the hydroelectric projects, including those in Idukki and Mullaperiyar, the blasting done for the tunnelling work close to the dams has not even affected seepage levels, let alone caused structural damage,” he says, adding that the technology of controlled blasting has improved significantly.
On concerns about the 3.4 lakh litre water consumption a day during the operational phase, which will be brought through a 20 km pipeline from infiltration wells in Mullaperiyar river, T.V. Venkateswaran, Scientist F, Vigyan Prasar , says that though the usage is considerable, it is not significant enough to affect drinking water and irrigation needs served by the river as alleged by the critics.
A rough calculation shows that the daily requirement for INO will be 0.015 % of the daily drinking water requirement of 227 million litre for Madurai city. In other words, it will take around 18 years for INO to consume one day’s need of Madurai city.
While critics have alleged that the actual requirement will be significantly larger than what is projected, Dr. Indumathi said that the actual usage might be lesser.
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