THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A three-member expert committee appointed by the Kerala Government to make an assessment of an increase in water level in the Mullaperiyar dam has said the ecological impact of a dam failure will be catastrophic.

``An easiest way to avoid that is to restrict the water level in the reservoir to the present level,'' the committee said in its report presented to Water Resources Minister N. K. Premachandran here on Tuesday. The committee consisted of Dhurbajyothi Ghosh (chairman), regional vice-chairman, Commission on Ecosystem Management of International Union for Conservation of Nature for South Asia, and Senior Fellow, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; H.S.A. Yahya, Professor, Department of Wildlife Sciences, Aligarh Muslim University; and Saroj Kumar Patnaik, former Additional Principal Conservator of Forests, Orissa.

Tiger will be in peril

The committee observed that any increase in the water level would submerge a greater part of the critical grasslands of the Periyar ecosystem. This could severely impair the food chain of the endangered tiger whose prey base is the deer depending on the grassland. Such a situation should be avoided in a reserve dedicated to tiger and protected under the Wildlife (Protection) Act. Additionally, loss of grasslands would drastically affect the sighting of animals and reduce tourist inflows. This in turn would affect the earnings of the local people. It would be imperative to carry out a detailed EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment), as a statutory requirement, to fully understand the ecological impact .

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