Chennai: Tamil Nadu Assembly on Friday passed a unanimous resolution urging the Union government not to approve the grant of permission by a committee of the environment ministry to conduct Environmental Impact Assessment Study for building a dam across Siruvani river by the Kerala government.
The Centre should not approve the recommendation of the expert appraisal committee of the Union ministry of environment, forest and climate to grant standard of terms for reference to conduct the study for the project which has no consent from TN and the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal.
The resolution stated that Siruvani is a tributary of Cauvery, which is an inter-state river and the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal had taken into account, the amount of water flowing in Siruvani and Bhavani rivers when calculating the share of water to each state from the Cauvery.
The resolution appealed to the centre not to accord any clearance to projects in Cauvery basin till the Cauvery Management Board and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee come into force and judicial references are settled.
“It is regrettable that the Expert Appraisal Committee has considered the subject as an additional agenda item in the meeting and gave the approval in hasty manner.
The Assembly also expresses its deep regrets over the committee’s statement that several letters had been sent to Tamil Nadu government and it has not replied to them as the statement was contrary to truth”, the resolution noted.Pointing out a flaw in the statement of the committee, the resolution said it had used “instead of several letters sent from the government of Kerala’ and added that the right usage should be ‘in spite of’, indicating the haste with which the committee had acted.
The resolution further said following reports in the media that Kerala is trying to build a dam across Siruvani, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had written a letter on 21 June 2012 to the then Prime Minister to advise Kerala not to proceed with the project till the final verdict of the tribunal is notified in the gazette.
