Perched high up in the Western Ghats, adjacent to Kerala’s famed Periyar wildlife sanctuary, is a 126-year-old dam that has dangerously outlived the 50 years of life intended for it by colonial British engineers.
NK Premachandran, a member of parliament from Kerala, describes the 53.6 metre-high Mullaperiyar dam on the Periyar river as “a ticking timebomb waiting to explode, not only because of its antiquity but also because it is located on an acknowledged seismic zone”.
“As Kerala’s water resources minister [from 2006 to 2011], I commissioned studies on the safety of the dam by the Indian Institute of Technology at Roorkee, which specialises in dams and irrigation, and IIT-Delhi. Both institutes had deemed Mullaperiyar fit to be decommissioned but the issue got bogged down in political wrangling and litigation in the Supreme Court,” Premachandran told SciDev.Net.
Premachandran is…