FORMER chief justice of India Justice A S Anand will head a five-member committee to examine the safety of the Mullaperiyar dam. A five-judge Constitution bench comprising Justice D K Jain, Justice B Sudershan Reddy, Justice M K Sharma, Justice R M Lodha and Justice Deepak Verma asked the empowered committee to submit its report within six months.
A five-member Empowered Committee headed by a retired Supreme Court judge will now decide whether the height of the century-old Mullaperiyar Dam, supplying water to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, should be raised. The matter has been the bone of contention between the two States.
Kerala on Tuesday said neighbour Tamil Nadu has neither riparian nor constitutional right to challenge its law restraining the state from raising the height of Mullaperiyar dam from 136 feet to 142 feet.
Can the legislature make a law to circumvent the inconvenience of a Supreme Court judgment? This is what the Tamil Nadu government wants a fivejudge Constitutional Bench of the apex court to decide on after the Kerala Assembly passed a Dam Safety Act to allegedly bypass a Supreme Court decision in 2007 to raise the water level of the Mullaperiyar dam from 136 to 142 feet.
ALAPPUZHA: Health and Social Welfare Minister P K Sreemathi on Tuesday said that the Kerala Pollution Control Board would soon set up a Continuous Ambient Water Quality Monitoring Station (CAWQMS) in the Eloor stretch of the Periyar.
Vaiko (V Gopalaswamy), general secretary of Tamil Nadu's Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetta Kazhakam (MDMK), threatened Kerala with 'economic blockade' if it went ahead with the plan for construction of a new dam near the 113-year-old one at Mullaperiyar in Idukki district, along the border between the two States.
IDUKKI: Kerala will submit a detailed project report to the Centre over the proposed construction of a new dam at Mullaperiyar in place of the existing structure within six months.
This was stated by N K Parameswaran Nair, convenor of the three-member Mullaperiyar cell recently set up by the state government, after visiting the spot today where the survey for the new dam had been completed.
