Report on the Koodankulam Public Hearing The Koodankualm nuclear power project authorities had planned to conduct a secretive public hearing on October 6, 2006 at the Tirunelveli collector's office. They had published a small ad in the most obscure Economic Times newspaper which almost nobody reads in our part of the country and in the Tirunelveli edition of a Tamil daily, Dinakaran, which is also not the most popular Tamil newspaper. The Koodankulam authorities had planned to keep the number of the public small so that they could manipulate the outcome as they wished.
They had also chosen a Friday afternoon ( 3 P.M. to be precise) so that they could hurry up the meeting and wrap it up in less than two hours. With the formality completed in a few hours with a few people, they thought they could merrily add four more mega nuclear power plants that would generate 4,000 MW electricity. Alas, things turned out to be very bad for them. Some 700 to 800 people had turned up and the group included many rural women who were not reluctant to speak their minds. In fact, they were so sincere to the cause, articulate and hence very forceful. At 3 PM , the Koodankulam authorities had taken their seats with bottled mineral water in front of them to face the afternoon heat in a relatively small-sized concrete hall. They did not even bother to arrange a pot of unsafe river water for the public. The small hall was teeming with people from Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi and Kanyakumari districts. As soon as the district collector showed up at around 3:15 PM , one of the public asked the Koodankulam authorities what arrangements they had made to select the speakers from the public. Realizing their unpreparedness, one official started collecting the names of the public who wanted to speak their minds. Then another officer started their 30-minute slide-show with the first slide depicting the various uses of nuclear power. No sooner did he show the first slide when a prominent person from Kanyakumari district stood up and said that we were not there for a lecture on nuclear power. Some sections of the crowd started shouting slogans, asking the Koodankulam authorities not to kill the Nature, not to kill the people and to terminate the whole nuclear power project at Koodankulam. It was so noisy and confusing that nobody could speak anything or hear anybody. Several members of the public approached the district collector and expressed their concerns both individually and collectively. The sitting MLA from Radhapuram constituency, one Mr. Appavoo, tried to play the big brother role and undertake the task of facilitating the public hearing. Unhappy with his track-record, the public booed and shouted him down. After almost an hour of chanting and sloganeering, the district collector managed to find a brief break to announce that he was asking the Koodankulam authorities to take out ads for the public hearing in all the major daily newspapers with enough lead time for the people to prepare for the public hearings and to hold the public hearings in all the three affected districts. Some members of the public also asked for a Tamil translation of the Environmental Impact Assessment report and public hearing in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam and Pathanamthitta districts of Kerala. Several members of the public raised objections to taking the Pechiparai dam water (which is in Kanyakumari district) to the Koodankulam plants. The EIA clearly mentions that the dam water would be taken to the plant through embedded pipes. When some members of the public brought this to the collector's attention, the nuclear authorities claimed that they were not going to take the dam water but would use desalination plants instead. When the unambiguous dam water plan in the EIA was pointed out, the nuclear authorities claimed that the EIA was outdated. Then the question was how they could conduct a public hearing with an outdated EIA. Thus the Koodankulam authorities' bluff was called. However, the biggest joke of the day was some of the Koodankulam authorities asking us in private and friendly conversation to be "democratic and fair". We asked them back if they were democratic and fair. Their nervous smile answered that question. The public dispersed around 4 PM with the satisfaction that a small but important battle was won. But there are many more "miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep." S. P. Udayakumar October 6, 2006 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala run by Global Alternate Information Applications (GAIA) To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
