The Hindu : Plea to release details of water-sharing talks

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 14, 2004

Kerala

Kerala

Plea to release details of water-sharing talks

By Our Special Correspondent

KOCHI, JAN. 13. The grama panchayat presidents of Mookkannur and Athirappally and the functionaries of the Chalakkudippuzha Samrakshana Samiti have urged the Kerala Government to immediately release to the public the details of the revision of the Pramabikulam-Aliyar Project (PAP) agreement with the Tamil Nadu Government.

They wanted the Government to scrap the 1970 agreement (which took retrospective effect from 1959) and write it afresh after plugging the loopholes and making Tamil Nadu compensate for the numerous violations of the accord.

They told a news conference here on Tuesday that the 1959 PAP agreement (for sharing the waters of the Chalakkudippuzha, Bharathappuzha and the Periyar) was `totally against the interests' of the State and that it sought to meet the irrigation, power and drinking water needs of Tamil Nadu even while lakhs of people living in the basins of these rivers were denied of water.The Athirappally panchayat president, P.N. Pushpangadhan, the Mookkannur panchayat president, C.M. Verghese, and the Chalakkudippuzha Samrakshana Samiti functionaries, Unnikrishnan and Latha, said it was mysterious that the Kerala Government had kept the terms of the PAP revision under wraps. They suspected that the revised agreement, which would be inked by the respective Chief Ministers in a couple of months, had not only not addressed the defects of the original agreement, but also allowed drawing of more water by Tamil Nadu for irrigation at a time when farmlands in the drought-hit Chittur region were lying dry. For instance, they noted that the revised accord had agreed to release 2.5 tmc of water to Tamil Nadu from the Anamalayar, which was a tributary of the Edamalayar. This stream was not part of the original agreement, they said and feared that it would hit the Edamalayar project and reduce power generation.

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