Kerala - Kochi   

Athirappilly project will not pay off, says V.M. Sudheeran

KOCHI: Congress leader V.M. Sudheeran has said the benefits from the proposed Athirappilly hydel project will just be a fraction of the interest to be paid on the required heavy investment for the project.

At a convention organised by the Chalakkudy River Protection Forum and the Gandhi Peace Foundation here on Thursday, Mr. Sudheeran said no proper cost-benefit analysis of the project had been done. At a time when rest of the world was discussing the impact of climate change, it was odd that the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) was thinking of building a dam and a hydel project by destroying hundreds of acres of forests.

He said there was a lot of secrecy about the way the project was pushed by the KSEB. No comprehensive scientific study had been done on the project, the environmental impact assessment did not reflect the local people’s or environmentalists’ views and the approvals were all stage-managed.

“The people have not been taken into confidence and they have not been convinced of the project’s benefits,” he said. The three departments concerned —Agriculture, Water Resources and Forest—had not been consulted. “The project is being pushed by the ‘construction lobby’ within the KSEB and other departments,” he said.

Rajaji Mathew Thomas, MLA, chairman of the Kerala Assembly’s Committee on the Environment, said the project needed to be studied in depth and the people should be convinced. He called for shift of focus to non-conventional energy sources. The huge investments required for building dam-based hydel projects could be diverted for non-conventional energy.

The convention asked the government to drop the Athirappilly project and called for rejecting any project that required the destruction of forests and rivers.

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