“Why is Kerala not even discussing the Kudankulam nuclear plant though Thiruvananthapuram will be the first city, not Chennai or other Tamil Nadu cities, to be devastated in the event of a nuclear disaster?”
Aruna Roy, Magsaysay award winner and member of the National Advisory Council, questioning Kerala’s ‘indifference’ to the people’s agitation against the controversial project, said in an interview on Thursday that Keralites should be equally worried about the project as the Tamils.
Ms. Roy, one of the pioneers of the right-to-information campaign and Rajasthan’s Mazdoor-Kisan Shakti Sanghathan leader, who was at Kudankulam and the nearby Idinthikkarai over the weekend, pointed out that even without a nuclear disaster, the contaminated water discharged from the plant would contaminate Kerala’s sea water. This would irradiate the fish, damaging the fish resources and hitting the livelihoods of the Kerala fisherfolk.
Contamination
The discharged water would also contaminate the croplands in and around Kudankulam from where a substantial amount of vegetables, milk, and meat came to Kerala. This would seriously affect Kerala’s food security. Still, in a ‘progressive’ State where people’s movements were strong and assertive, why was the issue not being discussed in the public sphere and in the media, Ms. Roy wondered. Keralites should have been at the forefront of the protests against the nuclear plant, she said.
Ms. Roy claimed that over a million people who lived within the 30-km radius of the plant would be directly hit in the case of a nuclear meltdown. Viewed against the Fukushima, Japan, disaster caused by a tsunami, Ms. Roy said, the potential for a disaster was real as Kudankulam sat close to the coastline which was struck by the 2004 tsunami. Asked about former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s clean chit to the plant’s safety safeguards, Ms. Roy wondered how anyone could give such an approval by visiting such a technologically complex system just once.
Repression
“All the people in the area are against the plant and they have been peacefully protesting for long,” she said. But the government had unleashed a wave of repressions and thrown hundreds of people into prison. Police cases, including sedition charges, were framed against them. There was a man against whom there were some 200 cases pending. “People’s right to protest has been violated on a large scale,” she said. The State’s handling of the local people’s protest was fundamentally wrong.
She had met fishermen and beedi-makers who contributed up to 10 per cent of their income to keep the protest movement going. The movement met its financial needs mostly out of contributions from local people. The protest leaders kept accounts of the expenses which were transparent. Asked about the foreign funding controversy, Ms. Roy countered: “Isn’t the Indian government being funded by foreign donors? Doesn’t the government take funding from the World Bank and other financial institutions?” She noted that it was not easy to get foreign funding without the government’s approval and knowledge.
Ms. Roy said the government was keeping the technological data of the plant under wraps, even refusing to give away them under the Right to Information Act. In a democracy, she said, facts about such a critical project that affected lakhs of people should be kept in the public domain and discussed and debated by the people and experts. “If the people do not want the plant in their midst, it should be closed down. Political expediency and energy needs should not be given priority over the lives of thousands of people.”
Ms. Roy suggested that the nuclear plant, if closed, could be turned into a university or a museum.
