The State government should order a judicial inquiry into Sunday’s collapse of a building under construction at Tiruvarur Central University in Neelakudi, said MDMK general secretary Vaiko in Coimbatore on Monday.
Addressing journalists at the party office, he said a rise in incidents such as Mugalivakkam in Chennai and now in Tiruvarur only indicate that construction companies seemed to be violating safety measures and using poor-quality materials. Such accidents in construction sites had created a fear psychosis among the people and had led to loss of trust in builders. Therefore, the government should order an inquiry by a sitting judge.
On the issue of the Karnataka government planning to construct two check dams across River Cauvery in Mekedatu and Rasimanal, he said that the Central government should act on it on the basis of law, legality and in fairness and not keep in the mind the BJP’s political prospects in Karnataka.
The government should realise that it could not act against the order of the Cauvery River Water Disputes Tribunal. The State government should prevail upon the Central government to constitute the Cauvery Management Board and Water Regulation Committees.
The State government should help the Centre realise that livelihood in 15 districts and agriculture in over 14 lakh acres would be affected if the Karnataka government were to construct the dams and that the Tamils would rise in protest.
And, the Central government would do well to realise that the Karnataka government’s claim that the two check dam projects were only for addressing water needs was wrong. The upper riparian State had planned to irrigate over 11 lakh acres, he claimed.
Mr. Vaiko charged the State government with negligence on power management. With summer fast approaching, textile industries and MSMEs had started facing power cuts. In this background, the State government calling off the thermal power plant projects raised several questions and suspicions.
The government needed to come clean on the issue. He also sought a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the suicide of agriculture engineer S. Muthukumaraswamy, in which the former State Agriculture Minister ‘Agri’ S.S. Krishnamoorthy was alleged to have a role.
