Jayalalithaa asks for CISF again

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Chief minister J. Jayalalithaa lashed out at Kerala on the Mullaiperiyar dam issue and said its attempt to thwart Tamil Nadu government’s efforts on closing the holes in the dam as “a ploy to weaken the
dam.”

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been at loggerheads over the 116-year-old dam, built under an accord between the then Maharaja of Travancore and the erstwhile British Raj. Tamil Nadu wants the dam’s storage capacity to be enhanced from the present 136 feet to 142 feet as per a Supreme Court order, while Kerala wants a new dam to be built to replace the dam.

Ms Jayalalithaa, who had earlier convened a special session of the Assembly on the Mullaiperiyar dam issue, had reiterated the need for posting CISF at the dam. She had first placed the demand for deploying CISF last year when the dam row reached a flash point. “But the Prime Minister is yet to acceded to the demand,” she said.

The Mullaiperiyar dam, fed by the Periyar river, is situated in Kerala, and its waters irrigate the five districts of Theni, Dindigul, Madurai, Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram in the state. This helps to cultivate paddy, sugarcane, banana, grapes, coconut, vegetables, a variety of pulses and cotton, besides supplying drinking water to people in these districts.

As per an estimate the crop losses to Tamil Nadu, owing to the reduction in the height of the dam, between 1980 and 2005, was a whopping Rs40,000 crores. In the process the farmers of the erstwhile rain shadow areas in Tamil Nadu who had started a thrice yearly cropping pattern had to go back to the bi-annual cropping.