Starting in 1988 and until his death, Kalam wrote more than a dozen books about his vision for a developed India by 2020 and the role he believed students could play in it.
Note: This article was originally published on July 28, 2015, and was republished on July 27, 2020, on the occasion of Kalam’s death anniversary.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was a man of many parts. Best known for the good nature he brought to the office of the president, he was also an author and inspirational speaker, a poet in Tamil, an amateur musician and polymath. Most of all, however, he was a scientist with a flair for inventiveness, adaptation and administration – qualities that propelled him to the frontlines of the national imagination when the rocketry that he devoted most of his professional life to helped India reach for the skies.
Kalam was President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, on October 15, 1931, and died in Shillong, Meghalaya, on July 27, 2015, aged 83.
After the launches of the Aryabhata, Bhaskara and APPLE satellites in the late 1960s, the Indian space research community had begun to mull an indigenous launch vehicle, one that would lift India’s satellites from Indian soil – a matter of pride to a nation that had been independent for less than 25 years. One of the most significant moments in the Indian space programme can be traced to November 1973, when the then ISRO Chairman Satish Dhawan and Brahm Prakash, the director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, chose to restructure the SLV-3 management team to make it launch-ready within a decade. They reposed their faith in Kalam and appointed him project director.
Kalam had joined the Aeronautical Development Establishment, a branch of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, soon after graduating from college in 1960 and then moved over to ISRO.
The project he was entrusted with in 1973 was completed well ahead of time, even though it overran its budget by Rs 5 crore in 1976. On August 10, 1979, the organisation conducted the first experimental flight of the SLV-3. Although 36 out of 44 subsystems functioned normally, the launch failed. On July 18, 1980, the second experimental flight of the SLV-3 succeeded, launching the Rohini RS-I satellite into orbit and India into a group of four other countries with indigenous launch capabilities.
Did Kalam remember the 35th anniversary of the event last week? It couldn’t have been easy to forget: the SLV program became the precursor for two significant product lines integral to India’s eventual emergence as a space and military power, the PSLV rocket and the indigenous missile program. The latter included nuclear weapons, whose development Kalam aided despite the moral ambiguity surrounding their use.
In fact, it was in recognition of the history of the nation’s potent inheritance that both the BJP and the Congress agreed on Kalam’s appointment as the 11th President of India in 2002. Kalam oversaw as principal scientific adviser and head of the DRDO the 1998 testing of atomic weapons that made India a nuclear weapons state, inviting bristling sanctions from around the world.
His leadership of many ambitious, future-oriented government projects afforded him enviable vantage points from which to better understand the roots of India’s aspirations to greatness. Insights from such experiences, as well as the relationships he enjoyed with politicians, diplomats and other scientists could have imbued in him the popular optimism with which he used to frequently address school and college students.
Starting in 1988 and until his death, Kalam wrote more than a dozen books about his vision for a developed India by 2020 and the role he believed students could play in it. Kalam’s writing was marked by a childlike frankness, traits that in anyone less experienced would have signalled naïveté. After the end of his stint as principal scientific adviser in 1999, he had resolved to meet with a 100,000 students around the country, to help them “ignite their imagination” and prepare them to “work for a developed India”.
In fact, the brushes he had with controversy were also associated with India’s nuclear ambitions. By 1990, Kalam had identified nuclear self-sufficiency as one of the critical technologies necessary for the country to become a superpower by 2020. After the Pokhran-II tests in 1998, which he strongly advocated, he and former Atomic Energy Chairman Chairman R. Chidambaram expressly dismissed claims that the thermonuclear bomb tested had been a fizzle, i.e. had yielded much less than what it had been designed for. Though he resigned the next year, Kalam continued to speak in favour of holding nuclear weapons, and not just as a deterrent. In 2001, he suggested they might need to be used, too: “Every weapon is made … not for storing but for deployment.”
In 2011, he disappointed the people protesting the construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant near Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, when he conducted an informal inspection of the site and declared the plant to be safe. The government had hoped Kalam’s intervention would help disarm the plant’s local critics but his refusal to meet the protesters meant his stance had little impact. His known pro-nuclear position and cordial relationship with the then UPA-II government actually intensified the opposition to the plant, though it was eventually built.
His support for indigenous technology can be traced to a nation obsessed with the potential applications of engineering since the early 1950s, when Nehru famously described the Bhakra Nangal dam as the “new temple of resurgent India”. On the other hand, his advocacy of technology led him to underestimate the gap between technocratic certitude and the sociological impact of such projects. Recently, he co-wrote an oped in The Hindu about how India could benefit greatly from a neutrino observatory in Theni, Tamil Nadu, as if stating the scientific facts of the project alone would suffice to quell the many disputes surrounding the project.
Whether it was his advocacy of nuclear weapons, his conversion – but only after leaving Rashtrapati Bhavan – to the cause of the abolition of the death penalty, his occasionally indifferent poetry, and his embarrassing fondness for getting audiences to repeat his homilies in unison, there was always a side of Kalam even his admirers may not have found appealing. But it was impossible to remain unmoved in his presence, his face often set to a stern expression like a schoolteacher who has struck upon an epiphany, his neatly partitioned mane of silver hair staying obediently out of the way.
The success of the SLV-3 fetched him a Padma Bhushan in 1981; excellence at the DRDO, the Padma Vibhushan in 1990; and ultimately the Bharat Ratna in 1997.
Late last year, ISRO had said it was looking for a suitable spaceport site “near Gujarat”, but the idea was likely dropped and attention shifted to Tamil Nadu.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has commenced land acquisition for its second launchpad in Kulasekarapattinam, a town in the Thoothukudi (Tuticorin) district of Tamil Nadu, news agency IANS reported on November 29.
News of this launchpad has been doing the rounds for a year or so but a confirmation of the scale of activities planned in the chosen area was hard to come by.
IANS also quoted Thoothukudi district collector Sandeep Nanduri as saying the total land requirement will be 2,300 acres.
ISRO’s first and only spaceport, the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), is located in Sriharikota, about 100 km north of Chennai, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The organisation launches its PSLV and GSLV rockets from here.
The SDSC, setup in 1971, currently has two active launchpads. Its first launchpad was decommissioned once the Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle programme ended in 1994. The first of the two active pads mostly services the PSLV and the second, the GSLV, and which ISRO is currently modifying to accommodate crewed vehicle missions as part of its upcoming human spaceflight project, Gaganyaan. A third launchpad in the same premises is also in the works.
The second spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam is expected to provide an important advantage to ISRO’s upcoming Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), a smaller counterpart of the PSLV that the organisation has developed to launch small-satellites more frequently.
The PSLV is designed to launch satellites into pole-to-pole, or polar, orbits around Earth. However, it can’t enter into such an orbit straightaway after launch because its trajectory needs to avoid flying over Sri Lanka, protecting its popular centres from any debris from the rocket. So once the rocket lifts off from Sriharikota, it flies further east to avoid Sri Lanka and then steers itself back towards the South Pole.
This manoeuvre requires more fuel, and for a smaller rocket like the SSLV, the addition could eat into its already limited payload capacity and reduce the rocket’s value for Antrix, ISRO’s commercial ventures operator. By setting up a spaceport in Kulasekarapattinam, however, the SSLV will lift off over the Lakshadweep Sea and won’t have to swerve around Sri Lanka as it climbs to higher altitudes.
This flight path is beneficial to the PSLV as well. However, analysis by Reddit user @Ohsin earlier this year suggested the size of the proposed spaceport together with limitations imposed by the exclusive economic zones of Sri Lanka, Maldives and the British Indian Ocean Territory confined the launch corridor to an area too small to be used by the PSLV.
India prefers its spaceports as close to the equator as possible and located on the east coast for two reasons. First, Earth’s rotation provides a speed boost to rockets launched in the eastward direction, such as the GSLV Mk II and Mk III, and headed for an equatorial orbit around the planet. The strength of the boost is higher closer to the equator. Second, in the event of a failure, debris from an explosion would fall into the Bay of Bengal instead of onto land, potentially damaging property or taking lives.
Late last year, ISRO had said it was looking for a suitable spaceport site “near Gujarat”, but the idea was likely dropped and attention shifted to Tamil Nadu because a southern spaceport reduces the distance to the South Pole and ensures access to a vast, unpopulated area below the flight path.
IANS quoted an unnamed ISRO official saying the site in Kulasekarapattinam had in fact been “considered long ago” as a spaceport but was abandoned after “the locals opposed” it.
There has been some opposition this time as well, though not widespread. In June 2019, residents of Alagapuram panchayat in Thoothukudi district, near where the proposed launch site is located, petitioned the district collector after discovering that a part of the residential area of the panchayat, home to 2,000 families, was to be acquired to develop the site.
“Any development should not affect the people living there,” a former president of the panchayat had told Times of India then.
The state of Tamil Nadu in general has been wary of centrally funded Big Projects. Local activists and politicians had already successfully prevented the Department of Atomic Energy from setting up a very large science experiment in Theni district before the tragic events of May 2018, when the state government ordered police personnel to open fire against a mass protest against the Sterlite copper-smelting plant in Thoothukudi district – where Kulasekarapattinam is also located. Thirteen people were killed.
The first two launches of the SSLV – both developmental flights – are set to happen from the SDSC in Sriharikota. The first flight is scheduled for early 2020 (moved from November 2019 after delays due to the Chandrayaan 2 surface mission failure in September). Subsequent, operational flights will be moved to the Kulasekarapattinam spaceport, and ISRO has said it would like to transfer the SSLV programme over to private industry as well.
Note: This article originally stated that Gaganyaan missions would be flown from the upcoming third launchpad at SDSC. It’s actually a modified version of the second launchpad. The mistake was correct on December 1, 2019, at 5:57 pm.
A thousand-dozen satellites would outnumber stars visible to the naked eye and will be some of the brightest objects in the night sky.
Elon Musk is at the centre of a controversy, again. This time, the astronomers are up in arms. The reason: Musk’s SpaceX recently launched 60 satellites as a prototype for the company’s planned Starlink satellite project. In the next few years, SpaceX plans to launch dozens more satellites into low-Earth orbit, with the goal to provide internet access worldwide at a supposedly low cost. Ultimately, the constellation is expected to span 12,000 satellites orbiting Earth in three shells between 340 and 1,150 km.
The problem is that these satellites have shiny metal surfaces and solar panels that strongly reflect sunlight, making them very bright, sometimes so much so that they are visible to the naked eye. Many amateur astronomers have already managed to capture a ‘train’ of some of these satellites moving through the night sky.
The astronomy community’s protest was almost immediate, and included both amateur astrophotographers and professional astronomers. A thousand-dozen satellites would outnumber stars visible to the naked eye (although only about 80 are visible simultaneously from any location) and will be some of the brightest objects in the night sky. This doesn’t bode well for stargazers and astrophotographers, whose field of view is bound to be marred.
Further, unlike astrophotography, astronomy banks on deeper observations of the sky, with telescopes’ exposures lasting up to a few hours, sometimes more. These instruments are typically sensitive to very faint light, and bright satellites foregrounding stars could ruin observations. It is notable that these observations are very expensive: those with world-class facilities can cost several thousand dollars per hour, not to mention many hours of labour as well as the opportunity cost.
Radio telescopes will be affected even more. Radio signals arriving from astronomical sources in distant parts of the universe are extremely weak. A mobile phone on the Moon emits enough radio-frequency radiation to be the strongest source in the sky. Thus, human-made signals often mask astronomical signals and contaminate the data, or add artefacts in images that can lead to misinterpretation.
Frequencies in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum that are useful to humans are into bands: AM, FM, TV broadcast, military, etc. Certain bands are reserved for astronomical observations because of their scientific importance. For example, the 1.4 GHz band is used to study the abundance of hydrogen in the universe. So to facilitate their observations, radio observatories are built in places where there are few humans, called radio-quiet zones.
However, the Starlink satellites could disturb this hard-earned peace, disrupting important signals as they pass over the telescope. Considering SpaceX intends Starlink’s signals to reach remote areas and providing internet access in under-served regions, the constellation will be visible from most places on Earth and will likely interfere with most current and future radio observatories.
At present, the extent of this disturbance vis-à-vis professional astronomy is not fully clear. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will be able to scan the entire sky in just three nights of observations, said after a preliminary study that their observations will be largely unaffected thanks to modifications its team will be able to make to the instrument’s imaging strategy and algorithm.
But other observatories – especially small- and medium-scale telescopes – that study exoplanets, monitoring asteroids, perform all-sky surveys, etc. will be affected more. The Starlink constellation will be using the K-a and K-u radio bands, which overlap with the operating frequencies of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an ambitious radio telescope on which India is an important partner. Although SpaceX later said that the satellites will not use one of the bands, other companies or countries may not be so sympathetic.
Effect of interference on observations. Left: Radio image of a star obtained by the VLA telescope. Right: The same image when a satellite passed overhead within 25º of the star’s position in the sky. Credit: G.B. Taylor, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Musk also countered, with his now-typical bombast, on Twitter that scientists should be moving their telescopes to space anyway. This is not possible. Astronomers already have access to some space telescopes, such as the Hubble and AstroSat; a subset of them can only function in space – such as the Chandra and the Fermi – because the X-rays and gamma rays they study are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. But the majority of astronomy research still banks on ground-based instruments that perform follow-up observations, large-scale, all-sky surveys, deep exposures, etc. – none of which we can pull off with space telescopes.
There are already 4900 satellites in orbit, which people notice ~0% of the time. Starlink won’t be seen by anyone unless looking very carefully & will have ~0% impact on advancements in astronomy. We need to move telelscopes to orbit anyway. Atmospheric attenuation is terrible. pic.twitter.com/OuWYfNmw0D
Sending telescopes to space is expensive and risky. They are very hard to maintain and upgrade, if not entirely impossible. Their sizes and therefore abilities are limited by the rockets that can launch them. Terrestrial observatories, on the other hand, are much larger, cheaper and easier to maintain. For example, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), to be built by the European Southern Observatory, will cost only $1.25 billion (Rs 8,671 crore) with a 40-metre-wide telescope mirror. On the other hand, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will have a mirror 6.5 metres wide but will cost nearly $10 billion (Rs 69,370 crore).
In effect, the ELT will – assisted by adaptive optics – collect more light than all other current 10-metre-class telescopes combined for about 12% of the price of a less capable space-based telescope. If he insists, Musk is of course welcome to help secure a trillion dollars to replace terrestrial telescopes with space-based ones.
The next generation of telescopes are as big as cathedrals. This image shows an artist’s rendition of the ELT next to an image of the Sagrada Família, Barcelona. Credit: ESO
These complaints from the astronomy community are also joined by concerns about reliability and national security. While many companies are trying to improve access to affordable internet services in the world’s more under-serviced areas, the cost is likely to be high relative to data piped through fibre-optic cables and 4G networks. Additionally, given its importance as a resource, governments like to be in control of internet availability and access within their borders.
However, the companies remain undeterred; and after SpaceX’s initial success, they are only bound to increase their efforts. So now is a good time for astronomers to plan for satellite interference.
Several professional organisations, including the International Astronomical Union, the European Southern Observatory, the Royal Astronomical Society, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the SKA team, have released statements calling on companies to consult with them before spamming the sky with satellites. The NRAO has also said that it is in touch with the Starlink team to discuss how to minimise radio interference. These organisations, and their members, should also campaign for international standards to prevent surprises of this sort in the future.
The night sky has an important place in the cultural heritage of humankind. After the Starlink controversy broke out, many experts noticed similarities with the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii; the island’s native inhabitants consider the mountain sacred. In both cases, one group acted unilaterally, in the name of technology and progress as it saw fit, without giving much thought to adjusting for or preserving the other’s access to entities and resources that the latter considers culturally significant.
This is a lesson in many things but perhaps most of all, it should teach us of the importance of communication. If SpaceX had consulted with those professional organisations, as well as with organisations that recognise the cultural importance of the night sky, before launching the satellites, and if Musk had got off his high horse, the ongoing controversy could have been avoided. We should learn to consult with all stakeholders and keep ourselves open to constructive dialogue, and thus craft mutually beneficial solutions.
Abhijeet Borkar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Astronomy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Ondřejov.
The show focuses on seven mega-science projects supported by countries around the world, including India.
Mumbai: An 11-month long and nationwide roadshow to create a buzz around various international mega-science projects devoted to understanding the working of the universe from the atomic to the astronomical level rolled out in Mumbai on May 8.
The programme is named Vigyan Samagam and is being executed in the form of a travelling exhibition that features galleries of posters, working models, exhibits, audio-visuals informational materials, electronic displays and interactive kiosks.
The first destination was Mumbai’s Nehru Science Centre, where the show plans to stay for two months, until July 7. It will then move to Bengaluru, where it will be open to the public from July 29 to September 28 at the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum.
The next stop will be Kolkata, where it be open at the Science City from November 4 to December 31. The final stop will be at the National Science Centre in New Delhi from January 21 to March 30 next year.
The exhibitions will be open on weekends and holidays as well, from 10 am to 6 pm.
The show focuses on seven mega-science projects supported by countries around the world, including India. They are the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Switzerland; the India-based Neutrino Observatory, Tamil Nadu; the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, Germany; the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a fusion reactor in France; the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatories in the US and on the one being planned in India; the Thirty Meter Telescope; and the Square Kilometer Array, South Africa.
These projects throw light on crucial questions related to the origin of the universe and its evolution through its various stages. They relate to particle physics, including properties of particles like the Higgs boson and neutrinos, the detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes and merging neutron stars, and precision engineering challenges involving the containment of extremely energetic plasmas.
Among other things, the programme will highlight India’s contributions in these research and development activities.
The inaugural event at each venue will be followed two days of events comprising talks and lectures by eminent speakers from research and industry. These will be live-streamed through social media platforms.
Its organisers – the Departments of Science and Technology and Atomic Energy and the National Council of Science Museum (NCSM) – will also conduct quizzes, essay writing contests, drawing contests and science awareness cyclothons to engage schoolchildren and other students in attendance.
V.K. Saraswat, a member of NITI Aayog, emphasised the importance of science and technology for the country’s economic growth of the country in his launch speech, and hoped that the programme will help to inspire youth to take up scientific work as a career.
K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India, spoke of the need to make scientific and technological developments available in local languages to ensure they are accessible to more people (an issue he has discussed before in some detail).
A.D.Choudhary, the director-general of the NCSM, said the organisation was working on a plan to expand the show’s footprint to include smaller cities as well.
CMB Bharat will study radiation leftover from the time the first atoms formed in the universe.
A consortium of Indian scientists has submitted a proposal to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for a new space science mission called CMB Bharat. Let’s break it down.
What is CMB Bharat?
Tarun Souradeep, a senior professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, told The Wire that the proposal is for a “comprehensive next generation cosmic microwave background mission in international collaboration, with a major Indian contribution.”
What is the cosmic microwave background?
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is radiation leftover from the time the first atoms formed in the universe, about 378,000 years after the Big Bang. In other words, it’s been around since when the universe was only 0.0027% as old as it is today. It is the smoke of the ‘smoking gun’, as it were.
It manifests as a temperature of 2.7 K in the emptiest regions of space. Without the CMB, these regions should have exhibited a temperature of 0 K. However, as the universe continues to expand, this temperature will keep dropping. The ‘microwave’ in its name alludes to the radiation’s frequency: 160.23 GHz, which falls in the microwave range.
As radiation that has been around (almost) since the dawn of space and time, it carries the signatures of various cosmic events that shaped the universe over the last ~13.7 billion years. So scientists hoping to understand more about the universe’s evolution often turn to instruments that study the CMB.
Souradeep: “It proposes near-ultimate survey polarisation that would exhaust the primordial information in this ‘gold-mine’ for cosmology.”
The CMB contains different kinds of information, and each kind can be elicited depending on which instruments scientists use to study it. For example, the European Space Agency’s Planck space probe mapped the CMB’s small temperature variations throughout the universe. Based on this, scientists were able to obtain a clearer picture of how mass is distributed throughout space.
The other major feature of the CMB apart from its temperature is its polarisation. As electromagnetic radiation, the CMB is made up of electric and magnetic fields. When the electric fields bump into certain forces or objects in their path, the direction they’re pointing in changes. This flip is called a polarisation.
By studying how different parts of the CMB are polarised in different ways, scientists can understand what kind of events might have occurred to have caused those flips. It is essentially detective work to unravel the grandest mysteries ever to have existed.
The CMB Bharat proposal envisages an instrument that will study CMB polarisation to a greater extent than the Planck or NASA WMAP probes did – or, as Souradeep put it, to a “near-ultimate” extent. WMAP stands for Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Planck probed about 10% of the CMB’s polarisation, by his estimate, while WMAP probed even less.
What kind of instrument will CMB Bharat be?
Souradeep said that it is an imager with “6,000 to 14,000 power detectors in the focal plane”. The focal plane is the plane along which the detectors will make their observations.
They will be maintained at a very low temperature, at much less than 1 K. This is because these instruments will emit heat during operation, which will have to be siphoned away lest it interfere with their observations.
As a result, they will be sensitive in the attowatt range – i.e. to power changes of the order of 0.000000000000000001 joule per second.
What kind of discoveries will CMB Bharat stand to make?
Its goals are classified broadly as ultra-high energy and high energy.
The ultra-high energy regime refers to a very young universe in which its energy was packed so tightly together that gravitational and quantum mechanical effects didn’t express themselves separately, as they do today. Instead, they were thought to have manifested in the form of a unified ‘quantum gravity’.
Of course, we don’t know this for sure; and even if the universe went through this phase, we don’t really know what reality would have looked like. According to Souradeep, CMB Bharat is expected to be able to “reveal the first clear signature of quantum gravity and ultra-high-energy physics in the very early universe”.
It would do this by looking for the quantum mechanical counterpart of gravitational waves. These are ripples of energy flowing through the spacetime continuum.
In classical – or gravitational – terms, they are known to be released when very massive bodies accelerate through the continuum. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories – known famously as LIGO – first detected such waves in 2015 and won its makers the Nobel Prize for physics in 2017.
Their quantum mechanical version – or ‘quantum gravity’ version – remains a mystery.
(An Indian LIGO detector is currently nearing its construction phase, at a site in Maharashtra. It is expected to be ready by 2023.)
CMB Bharat’s high-energy regime refers to constituents of the particulate realm. Per Souradeep, the mission will explore problems in neutrino physics, including help determine how many kinds of neutrinos there actually are and the order of their masses. This is also one of the goals of the planned India-based Neutrino Observatory in Tamil Nadu.
It will also be able to map the distribution of dark matter; and track baryons (composite particles like protons and neutrons) in the observable universe.
Additionally, the instrument will also be able to study the Milky Way galaxy’s astrophysical properties in greater detail.
What is the status of CMB Bharat?
“ISRO has a programmatic approach to science projects,” Souradeep said. Its Space Science Programme made an ‘announcement of opportunity’ for future astronomy programmes in February 2017. Following this, he said, a “consortium of cosmology researchers” led by him drafted a proposal for CMB Bharat in April that year.
“The project is under review and consideration.”
Souradeep told The Hindu, “Typically, ambitious space missions of this magnitude take over a decade [to] launch. We would like to be observing for 4-6 years and the time to final release of all data and release could extend to [about] five years.”
The KHEP will generate power. The INO will perform fundamental research.
On May 18, Edappadi K. Palaniswami, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, inaugurated the construction of the Kundah Pumped Hydro Electric Project (KHEP) in the Nilgiris.
The project’s financial outlay is Rs 1,650 crore and is expected to be completed in about six years. Once completed, it will be the third underground power station in Tamil Nadu and the largest hydropower-generating and pumping station in the state.
But a project of such size and complexity is not the only one at the moment in Tamil Nadu. The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is strikingly similar to the KHEP project in layout, excavation and construction methodology, disposal of excavated muck and other characteristics. However, their purposes are vastly different. The KHEP will generate power, the INO will perform fundamental research.
Nonetheless, both projects are considered important in the public interest.
But there are crucial differences in the way they are perceived.
The project components
The KHEP begins with a horizontal access tunnel leading to a large underground powerhouse cavern (98 l × 22 b × 42 h, all metres). The project also includes a head-race tunnel, a surge shaft, inclined twin pressure-shafts, penstock tunnels and a tailrace tunnel. Other appurtenances include a cable-cum-ventilation tunnel about a kilometre long, a tailrace surge shaft and a 500-m-long additionally driven intermediate tunnel (ADIT). All the tunnels will be about 7 m wide.
The KHEP is straddled between two extant reservoirs: the ‘upper’ Porthimund and the ‘lower’ Avalanche-Emerald. Its intake arrangements begin at the Porthimund while the tailrace tunnel debouches water directly into the Avalanche-Emerald.
The project has been designed to work in both generation and pumping modes. That is, water from the lower reservoir will be pumped back into the upper reservoir after power generation when the grid has surplus power. The tailrace tunnel will function as a headrace tunnel in the pumping mode.
The INO also consists of a horizontal access tunnel, about 2 km long, with an auxiliary tunnel, an ADIT, an intermediate tunnel and an additional tunnel. The main cavern will measure 132 l × 26 b × 32.5 h (all metres). There will also be three smaller cavern, each 8.6 l × 10 b × 3.5 h (all metres). The access tunnel will be about 7 m wide and other tunnels will be smaller.
The similarities
Both the projects are located completely underground by design, in the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu. Their feasibility studies were undertaken by the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and the detailed project reports prepared by the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB).
The projects are situated in similar geological and geomorphological milieus. The tunnels will pass through charnockite, migmatite gneiss and quartzo-feldspathic gneiss rocks, traversed by pegmatites and dolerite dykes. Geological weaknesses – such as foliation, joints, shears and intrusions – will be more or less similar, sans any sharp contrasts.
The general rock mass for both projects have been rated between ‘fair’ and ‘very good’ on the Q-system of rock mass classification. Their underground caverns will be built by excavating using the drilling and blasting methods. However, the KHEP involves a much larger volume of excavation – and more explosives to do so – than the INO. This is chiefly because the former needs more tunnels, vertical and inclined shafts and other arrangements.
Ecologically, the KHEP will have more green cover in its neighbourhood than the INO because it will be located in the Nilgiris – and in an area least prone to landslides, according to the GSI. The INO will be located in the Bodi Hills near Theni.
More specifically, both projects are located in the peripheral area of seismic zone II, as defined by the Bureau of Indian Standards. This zone has the lowest seismic risk in the country.
One technical difference between the two projects is that the rock cover for the INO will be considerably higher than that of the KHEP.
Special concerns about the INO
Given these details, how come activists and politicians raise ‘grave concerns’ about building the INO but keep mum about a similar project located between two reservoirs?
They have alleged that the excavation methods to be employed to build the INO’s cavern will damage the Idukki, Mullaperiyar and other reservoirs in the region. They have alleged that drilling and rock-blasting will precipitate extensive structural damages to houses located in nearby villages.
But unlike the KHEP, the INO is located 30-50 km away from reservoirs and its activities cannot affect them.
On the other hand, the KHEP’s construction has been widely accepted and no objections have been raised whatsoever.
This dichotomy suggests that the INO is being opposed for reasons more political and procedural than technical. Otherwise, those who have an issue with the INO should have been similarly opposed to the KHEP.
It is painful that the Tamil Nadu site for the INO was picked because no other site in the country was as suitable. But the propaganda whipped up against it has created a misguided impression that the Government of India chose the Bodi Hills to frustrate the local people, the environment, water bodies in the area, etc. – as if it had a score to settle with the state.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
V. Balachandran is former deputy director general of the GSI and a practising engineering geologist. He carries out natural hazard studies such as due to earthquakes and landslides.
The India-based Neutrino Observatory is a Rs-1,500-crore project that aims to build and install a 50,000-tonne detector inside a mountain in Tamil Nadu to study particles called neutrinos.
The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a mega science project stranded in the regulatory boondocks since the Centre okayed it in 2015, received a small shot in the arm earlier this week.
On November 2, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) dismissed an appeal by activists against the environment ministry’s clearance for the project.
The activists had alleged that the environment ministry lacked the “competence” to assess the project and that the environmental clearance awarded by the ministry was thus invalid. But the principal bench of the NGT ruled that “it was correct on the part of the EAC and the [ministry] to appraise the project at their level”.
The INO is a Rs-1,500-crore project that aims to build and install a 50,000-tonne detector inside a mountain near Theni, Tamil Nadu, to study natural elementary particles called neutrinos.
The environment ministry issued a clearance in June 2011. But the NGT held it in abeyance in March 2017 and asked the INO project members to apply for a fresh clearance. G. Sundarrajan, the head of an NGO called Poovulagin Nanbargal that has been opposing the INO, also contended that the project was within 5 km of the Mathikettan Shola National Park. So the NGT also directed the INO to get an okay from the National Board for Wildlife.
Poovulagin Nanbargal (Tamil for ‘Friends of Flora’) and other activists have raised doubts about the integrity of the rock surrounding the project site, damage to water channels in the area and even whether nuclear waste will be stored onsite. However, all these concerns have been allayed or debunked by the collaboration and the media. (At one point, former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam wrote in support of the project.)
Sundarrajan has also been supported by Vaiko, leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party.
In June 2017, INO members approached the Tamil Nadu State Environmental Impact Assessment Authority. After several meetings, it stated that the environment ministry would have to assess the project in the applicable category.
The ministry provided the consequent clearance in March 2018. Activists then alleged that this process was improper and that the ministry’s clearance would have to be rescinded. The NGT struck this down.
As a result, the INO now has all but one clearance – that of the National Board for Wildlife – it needs before the final step: to approach the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board for the final okay. Once that is received, construction of the project can be underway.
Once operational, the INO is expected to tackle multiple science problems. Chief among them is the neutrino mass hierarchy: the relative masses of the three types of neutrinos, an important yet missing detail that holds clues about the formation and distribution of galaxies in the universe.
The project is led by the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. It is funded by the Department of Atomic Energy.
The killing of anti-Sterlite protestors in Thoothukudi may have been warning shots, but the protesters have also made themselves heard: development can’t come at the cost of environmental health.
Chennai: The Tamil Nadu Government has announced a ban on the use of plastics from January 1, 2019. This is a remarkable move aimed towards reducing the amount of plastic waste generated in the state. But is this enough to save the environment in the state?
This announcement came barely a fortnight after the brutal killing of 13 people protesting against the Sterlite Copper unit in Thoothukudi. Sterlite Copper is one of the largest contributors to environmental pollution in Thoothukudi district – but not the only one. The Geological Society of India, in a journal article published in July 2017, stated, “Spatial interpolation of inverse distance method maps of all the elements suggested that discharge of effluents from chemical factory, … municipal wastewater and fertilizers were added to the natural sources.”
This indicates that though Sterlite Copper may have been closed, there is no assurance that the pollution in the city is under control. As a result, the need for a people’s movement to save Thoothukudi persists, as does the need for similar movements across the state.
Thoothukudi is not alone in its suffering, nor is its people’s movement the first of its kind in Tamil Nadu. The state has had a legacy on this front right since the days of Periyar’s self-respect movement in the 1920s. The people of Tamil Nadu have never hesitated to raise their voice against injustice, fight for their rights and organise against the establishment.
It is also not surprising that many of these movements in recent times are founded on environmental protection above all else. Having lost trust in lawmakers – both bureaucracy and politicians – the people have found their own ways to securing their rights and livelihood. They don’t ask for the support of popular leaders or the backing of political parties. They have often been met with physical, legal and mental oppression by the state. A few have succeeded; many others fight on. Thanks to the martyrs of the Sterlite protest, the issue has now received global attention.
The people of Cuddalore are waiting for this movement. The State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu (SIPCOT) unit in Cuddalore was established in 1984 for chemical industries, over 518.79 acres of land. Since then, the groundwater in the compound and in surrounding areas has become polluted and unusable. According to an analysis by the SIPCOT Area Community Environmental Monitors (SACEM) in 2014, the groundwater in and around SIPCOT contains carcinogenic chemicals and is unfit for human consumption.
SACEM also reported that people who had consumed the water have reported abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, intestinal bleeding, affected kidneys, bones, lungs, liver and nervous system and cancer, irritation and ulcers in the stomach and small intestine and anaemia and slower growth rate and mental development among children. Including SACEM, there are various groups agitating for more than 10 years to have SIPCOT closed.
In similar vein, the SIPCOT unit in Mettur has a number of chemical factories, of which Chemplast Sanmar is a major manufacturer of PVC resins, caustic soda, refrigerants and industrial salts. It has allegedly been releasing untreated water into the Cauvery river, on whose banks Mettur is located, for the last two decades or more. At first, public perception of the factory was centred on its providing jobs for the local people. But once local residents reportedly noticed a heightened incidence of cancer and reproductive issues, it shifted. The resistance, made up mostly of women, has been fighting against Chemplast plant for 20 years.
Abusing rivers
The Thamirabarani river flows through Tirunelveli. Credit: Karthikeyan.pandian/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
When the Sanmar group wanted to open another plant in Cuddalore in 2005, members of this movement travelled to Cuddalore and spoke to their compatriots living around the SIPCOT premises in attempt to have them block the project.
However, Chemplast Sanmar has categorically denied all of these allegations. In a statement sent to The Wire, Ramkumar Shankar, the managing director of the company, elaborated that the Mettur plant has had an effluent treatment plant on site since the 1960s conforming to standards set by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, and that in 2007, it was augmented by a zero liquid discharge (ZLD) plant. “The discharge point of the pipe that was earlier used to discharge treated effluents has been closed with concrete and this has been verified by local authorities as well,” Shankar wrote. He also added that Chemplast Sanmar’s Cuddalore unit also has a ZLD and desalination plants. “Since the inception of the Cuddalore plant in 2009, not a single drop of water has been drawn from the ground, nor has any effluent been discharged into the ground or any water body.”
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The founding premise of factories typically focuses on employment. But the cost they have imposed on their neighbourhoods is too much to bear. Two rivers, the Palar and the Noyyal, have already been devastated by industrial units situated on their banks.
The Palar originates in Karnataka and flows through Kancheepuram and Vellore districts. Once the primary source of drinking water and irrigation for the North and South Arcot regions, the river has been mostly dry for most of the year for the last two decades. Only streams of wastewater flow in the Palar, while the sand from its bed is robbed for its minerals. In 2008, the Social Action Movement and Water Rights Protection Group, Chengalpattu, released a documentary titled ‘En Peyar Palar’ (‘My name is Palar’) to highlight the river’s plight, and to draw attention to the Palar as well as a social movement growing to protect it. However, the government has not paid them much attention.
Smaller rivers like the Cheyyar and the Arisilaaru and the larger ones like Cauvery and Kollidam have also been plagued with sand-mining.
Pugalur, a small village on the banks of the Cauvery in Karur district, is crowded with lorries lining up to transport river sand. The people of Pugalur have been fighting this menace for the last five years. In conversations, they have reported being threatened by mining conglomerates unafraid to brag about their political connections. Many protesters have been beaten up; some have even been run over while trying to stop the lorries, but to no avail: the government doesn’t seem to have cared – nor the national media.
The Noyyal flows through Thiruppur, Tamil Nadu’s textile capital, and as such has been treated as a drainage channel. In September 2017, the river spewed froth onto Thiruppur’s streets, which floated into homes and offices. A February 2016 study by a researcher from the University of Madras found that more than half of the people interviewed in the city reported health problems like diarrhoea and cholera, while more than 75% said they suffered skin diseases.
In 1995, four years after the Orathapalayam dam was built on the river, farmers downstream objected to the water’s release, which had become contaminated from the dyeing and bleaching units upstream. They filed a case in the Madras high court the following year. In 1997, the court ordered that dam water should not be released for irrigation. It was because of the people’s movement that at least 160 units were shut down, and an effluent treatment plant installed. However, the river’s abuse continues unabated.
Further south, the Thamirabarani is a perennial river in Tirunelveli district. Coke and Pepsi bottling plants were set up in the Gangaikondan SIPCOT, and a government order in 1998 allowed SIPCOT to draw three million gallons of water per day from the Thamirabarani. Subsequent, two public interest litigations were filed in the Madurai bench of the Madras high court seeking a permanent ban on river water use by the bottling plants, but they were dismissed in 2017, and the companies continued to draw water from the river.
In December 2017, the Papanasam dam built on the river was almost full: there was water up to 123 feet against its maximum capacity of 143 feet, thanks to heavy rainfall. But on May 5, 2018, the water level was 20.6 feet. Where did the water go? It could not have been released for irrigation because the logs in the Manimuthar dam, about 18 km away, tell a different story. The water level in Manimuthar crossed the 100-feet-mark on December 1, 2017. On May 5, 2018, it was at 76.44 feet. The is just 23 feet between December and May, as against the difference of 122 feet in Papanasam in the same period. The farmers of the district suspect that the water was released to the Coke and Pepsi plants.
Lakes fare no better
A flooded ground along Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai following two days of cyclonic rains in the city. Credit: Vijay Thamarai
The plight of lakes is also deeply concerning. Tamil Nadu is historically known for lakes called eri (pronounced ‘aeri’) and its irrigation and draining functions. These lakes are interlinked as well as linked to different rivers and drain their waters.
In 2011, the Tamil Nadu government passed an act declaring encroachments on water bodies illegal. However, most lakes in the state had already been encroached upon, in many cases by government establishments such as colleges, bus stands in Villupuram and Tirunelveli, court premises, administrative offices, highways, etc. One of the earliest such encroachments was the Aringyar Anna Government Arts college in Villupuram. It was built in 1968 on a lake – as the Madurai bench of the high in Madurai. Ironically, all these buildings have rainwater harvesting facilities.
When the Tamil Nadu portion of the Golden Quadrilateral was built, many water bodies were encroached. The Trichy-Karur four-lane bypass was set to encroach upon four lakes: Piratiyur eri, Punganoor eri, Kallikudi lake and Thaiyanur lake, which are irrigation sources. Officials had planned for the road to divide these lakes into two segments, which means the road was to be constructed in the middle of these lakes.
The Tamil Nadu Agriculturists Association, represented by its organiser M.P. Chinnadurai; the Punganoor Eri Farmers’ Welfare Association, represented by K.R. Periyasamy Udayar; and an individual farmer named G. Selvakumar filed writ petitions against this proposal. On Novemner 9, 2010, the Madurai bench ordered that these lakes are to be preserved and, if necessary, the road could be built as a bridge over these lakes.
Notwithstanding this singular case, many newly built roads in the state have split several water bodies into two. Many ecologists have said that palm trees grown on the banks of the eri have strong roots and hence protect against erosion. The sight of a row of palm trees anywhere indicates the presence of a water body nearby. In the same vein, when you travel on a road flanked by palm trees on either side, you can be sure that the road has cut some water body in two.
In spite of the 2011 Act passed by the Tamil Nadu government, lawmakers have themselves encouraged the encroachment of water bodies.
In Kanchipuram district, still renowned for its lakes, a large number of interconnected lakes were constructed for irrigation purposes in the Pallava period (275-897 CE). They were connected to different rivers, including the Adyar.
The advent of the Greater Chennai project, most blocks of Kanchipuram district, especially those close to the Outer Mahabalipuram Road, precipitated a real-estate boom, especially over the last two decades. This has resulted in the encroachment of numerous water bodies and, of course, groundwater depletion.
Perhaps the most concerning encroachment was upon the Pallikaranai marshland, in South Chennai. Starting from Tidel Park, setup by the state government in 2000 to foster innovation in IT, the Pallikaranai marshland has been invaded by both governmental and private constructions. A large portion of the remaining area has been transformed into a landfill, used to dump garbage collected by the Chennai Corporation.
Many local waterbodies have also had private residential complexes built atop them. The effect of these encroachments was evident when the city flooded in December 2015, when these complexes were either underwater for many days or turned into islands. It was only after those floods that the government took measures to restore and revive the lakes and parts of the Pallikaranai marshland. Different NGOs have since been working on reviving the waterbodies and have also been engaged in creating awareness and prevent further incursions.
On the other hand, North Chennai is very polluted thanks to the presence of different industries. The Ennore creek in this part of the city has been gravely polluted by untreated wastewater and effluents. Once a flourishing mangrove swamp, it has now been reduced to small patches with no or little fish. One of the major contributors to this crisis is the North Chennai Thermal Power plant, also known as the Ennore power plant, which dumps its fly ash into the creek. A number of people have joined hands with the residents of Ennore to fight this nuisance, including Ramon Magsaysay award-winner T.M. Krishna. His ‘Poramboke song’ was released in January 2017 to save Ennore creek.
Against nuclear and neutrino projects
At a meeting organised by the INO collaboration with villagers from Pottipuram, Theni. Credit: INO
Similarly, the recent protests against the Kudankulam Nuclear power plant, methane and hydrocarbon projects in the Cauvery delta and the neutrino experiment project in Theni district have also received wide attention. This has created the impression that the people of Tamil Nadu are against all development projects – but the truth is that they have all risen up in protest together, and late.
Tamil Nadu is not a water-surplus state. It relies on rainfall and storage structures like dams and eri for its drinking water and irrigation. With rivers polluted and lakes encroached, the state with few options. Setting aside agricultural needs for a moment, it is frightening to imagine what the people of Tamil Nadu will do for drinking water in thirty years (considering a NITI Aayog study has already found that India will only have half the water it needs by 2030).
Many urban centres, such as Dindigul, are on the cusp of complete groundwater depletion. Chennai and Madurai are getting there fast. Today, a major portion of Chennai’s drinking water comes from around the city, not from within, and the water-table in these parts has been falling. Official announcement or not, Tamil Nadu is a water-stressed state in 2018. Against this background, it is painful to note that the developmental and industrial projects proposed or executed by the government are either highly water-polluting or water-consuming.
Consider the case of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) proposed to be set up in Theni. This district is known for its production of vegetables and fruits, and is a major supplier of such foods to Kerala. However, Kerala has denied Tamil Nadu water from the Mullai Periyar Dam. The Tamil Nadu government filed a case to raise the dam’s storage level. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in its favour: the water level was raised. Thankfully, that year, there were also heavy rains and the dam filled up. But the farmers’ joy didn’t last long.
People in the area have been concerned that the INO will use 3.4 lakh litres of water a day once it becomes operationalised, and farmers have come out in protest. While they have agreed that setting up the INO would be a matter of national pride, they have also petitioned that it should have been situated in a water-surplus district, and not in a place like Theni, which has only just started receiving water from the Mullai Periyar. The INO is currently in a suspended state.
Onto nuclear: Did you know that Tamil Nadu is the only state in India to have two nuclear power projects? They are located at Kalpakkam (71.3 km south of Chennai) and Kudankulam (35.6 km north of Kanyakumari).
The villagers of Manavalakurichi, located about 64 km from Kudankulam, have been complaining of higher incidence of cancer and epilepsy and have been blaming the mining of beach sand, for radioactive minerals to feed nuclear reactors.
Pukalenthi, a medical doctor who has been working with Dalits and fisherfolk in Kalpakkam since 1989, was one of the first members of the anti-nuclear movement in Tamil Nadu, apparently motivated by having treated cases of radiation poisoning for almost 30 years. He joined S.P. Udayakumar, who had founded the movement only a year prior, and together they mobilised thousands of people in the area after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Idinthakarai, a village close to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, became the protest’s ground-zero. Here, Udaykumar and others organised a hunger strike in shifts, observed for over 500 days. At the same time, in early 2012, the government imposed a curfew in all villages within a seven-kilometre radius around the plant. In further effort to break up the gathering, the government mobilised the Coast Guard and police personnel on the ground in September 2012, and assaulted protesters. Two fishermen, Sahayam Francis and Antony John, were killed in the attack. Criminal cases – including that of sedition – were also filed against members of the People’s Movement against Nuclear Energy.
A beleaguered delta
The Cauvery delta in Tamil Nadu, spread over Thanjavur, Thiruchirapalli, Nagapattinam and Thiruvarur districts, has been reeling under the dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in sharing the river’s water. Once considered the ‘rice bowl of Tamil Nadu’, people in the area have been giving up farming due to lack of water. In this scenario, the state government floated three energy projects here: a hydrocarbon extraction unit in Neduvasal, a methane extraction project in Thanjavur and a Gas Authority of India, Ltd. (GAIL) pipeline in Nagapattinam.
Protests against the methane project were led by T Jayaraman, a retired professor and a veteran social activist from Mayiladuthurai, and G. Nammalvar, a renowned agricultural scientist and environmental activist (he passed away in 2013). Jayaraman has been arrested several times and charged under the Goondas Act. The principal protest itself began in 2010 and ended in 2016, when the government suspended the project.
The campaign for this protest fed into the protest against the hydrocarbon extraction project in Neduvasal, and for which many undergraduate and graduate students had also signed up. One of them, Valarmathi, was arrested and charged under the Goondas Act in July 2017, along with several others charged with different, but unspecified, crimes.
The GAIL pipeline project was vehemently opposed by the farmers of Nagapattinam, after they refused to give up their land for the project. GAIL subsequently said in a statement that the state government would have to obtain licenses from the landowners for it to be able to lay its pipes at a depth of one metre below ground, following which the land would be given back to the farmers. It also stated that some restrictions would be imposed on certain types of construction in the vicinity this land but that the cultivation of crops could continue as normal. However, the land acquisition agreement stated that no trees could be planted within 30 metres on either side of the pipeline.
In February 2016, J. Jayalalithaa, then the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that “the project would very adversely affect lakhs of mango, jackfruit and coconut trees which are extensively grown in the project affected areas. It is estimated that more than 1,20,000 such fruit bearing trees would have to be uprooted for laying the pipes.” GAIL then took the matter to court, and there it currently stands.
In similar vein, a protest by the villagers of Kathiramangalam, Thanjavur district, reached its one-year mark on May 19, 2018. The people have been agitating against an oil leak in July 2017 in infrastructure managed by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in the area. V.P. Mahawar, the onshore director of the unit in question, had said in a press conference at the time, ‘Two thousand litres of crude oil and 18,000 cubic metres of gas leaked out of the well. The total area affected is close to one acre.” Here – as in Thanjavur – protestors were booked under the Goondas Act, and the protest itself continues.
Finally, the mercury poisoning in Kodaikanal and the extent of environmental abuse in the district (of Dindigul) received some public attention following the release of ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’, a rap song video by Sofia Ashraf. Unilever, which had operated a factory in the town to manufacture mercury-based thermometers for export, was shut in 2001.
Mercury had seeped into the groundwater and ruined the lives of several hundreds of families and factory workers. Protestors in the town have been fighting for justice for the last 17 years. In June 2015, 11 families of the workers came to the Mumbai headquarters of Unilever to make themselves heard. After Ashraf’s video was released, many rights activists have joined hands with the protestors.
This list is not exhaustive, and omits Sagar Mala, the East Coast expressway and the Chennai-Salem ‘green’ expressway, among others. The state’s killing of anti-Sterlite protestors in Thoothukudi may have been a warning to their compatriots around Tamil Nadu, but the protesters have also made themselves heard: development can never come at the cost of environmental health.
Note: This article was corrected on June 19, 2018, to say that Manavalakurichi is located 64 km from Kudankulam, not 4 km as was stated earlier, and on July 5, 2018, to add Chemplast Sanmar’s response.
Poonkuzhali is a writer and activist based in Chennai.
It remains to be seen if the science academies’ statement will help move things along, or if they have articulated their stand too late in the day.
Chennai: India’s science academies triumvirate issued a joint statement today voicing their support for the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), a homegrown mega-science project planned in Tamil Nadu’s Theni district.
Their combined appeal follows a long series of backs-and-forths between the project’s collaborators, government bodies like the Union environment ministry and the state pollution control board, and the media itself. The project had received the green signal and a financial sanction of Rs 1,500 crore from the Cabinet in 2015, construction was expected to begin in 2016 and the INO was expected to go live in the early 2020s.
However, nothing has happened at the site. For the last five years or so, the project’s senior collaborators, mostly scientists from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, have been facing stiff resistance from a clutch of environmental activists, local politicians and the residents of Theni.
The principal sticking point appears to be the environmental clearance for the project. While the environment ministry sanctioned this only last month, there has been some confusion about whether the INO was cleared in the right category.
The supposed ambiguity has been driven by the project’s proximity to the Mudumalai National Park on the Kerala side of the border shared between the two states. However, the senior collaborators have consistently refuted this prompt, and have been able to produce the necessary documentation to back their claims up.
Another major issue is widespread misinformation about the nature of the project. The INO, using a 50,000-tonne stationary detector (i.e. with no moving parts), aims to study the properties of elementary particles called neutrinos. These particles are the second most abundant in the universe (after photons, the particles of light).
However, multiple media reports in the past have dubbed these particles as well as the experiment to study them as being sources of harmful radiation. Further, some activists have also alleged that the INO is set to constructed in a seismologically sensitive zone, and that drilling work to be undertaken in the area could damage underwater aquifers. These allegations have been repeatedly debunked – but they refuse to go away.
Within 15 days [of receiving the Cabinet sanction], Vaiko, the leader of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) party in Tamil Nadu, filed a writ petition against the project in the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, claiming that it would “bring unimaginable and terrible disaster to the mankind (sic) and the environment”.
Stephen Inbanathan [a materials scientist] was present when Vaiko personally came to argue his case at the High Court. There were no locals at the hearing, only members of Vaiko’s party and a few lawyers. “There will be radiation and this will affect people. What sin have these people committed? Are they guinea pigs?” he recalls Vaiko saying.
The joint statement in favour of the INO from the three science academies comes against this backdrop, and seeks to assuage readers that no harm will come of the project. Among other things, it states,
The Science Academies of India are strongly supportive of the establishment of such an experimental facility for its intrinsic scientific value. In addition to enabling Indian researchers to make a unique contribution to our understanding of several fundamental problems of physics, a major effort on this scale will also contribute significantly to the development of education and research infrastructure in Tamil Nadu.
Further compounding the mess in which the INO is currently stranded is a growing sense of victimisation among the people of Tamil Nadu. This sentiment reached its crescendo last year, following the Supreme Court’s decision in January 2016 to ban the traditional sport of jallikattu, when thousands of people gathered on Chennai’s Marina beach to protest the verdict.
The sense of victimisation reached another high last month, and continues to do so, in the form of the Sterlite copper plant in Thoothukudi, which has been found to be severely polluting its vicinity, and whose owners have been able to evade scrutiny despite multiple, and serious, allegations of wrongdoings.
Vaiko has joined protesters in Thoothukudi asking for the Sterlite plant to be shut down. On March 31, a member of Vaiko’s MDMK party set himself on fire to protest against the INO, and succumbed to his injuries later in the day.
It remains to be seen if the science academies’ statement will help move things along, or if they have articulated their stand too late in the day. These academies are the Indian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy.
The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change had recently granted an environmental clearance for the project.
Madurai: A 25-year-old member of the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) set himself ablaze here on March 31 in protest against the proposed neutrino project at nearby Theni district, according to police.
The incident occurred shortly before MDMK party leader Vaiko was to start his 10-day ‘protest by foot’ to create ‘awareness’ on the impact of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) project on farmlands.
The party cadre, named only as Ravi, set himself on fire near the dais where Vaiko was addressing a gathering at a meeting in the city. The fire was doused and Ravi was rushed to a private hospital for treatment, police said.
While claiming he often counselled his cadres against attempting immolation for causes, [Vaiko] also listed the various followers who had died immolating themselves for one ‘cause’ or another in the past, starting with the five who had perished in flames when he launched his party…
M.K. Stalin, the working president of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, had inaugurated the protest at Theni. Various parties in the state have been opposed to the INO and have demanded that the state government hold the clearance to be given by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board.
At a recent meeting of the party’s executive committee, the DMK adopted a resolution to ask the state government to approach the National Green Tribunal against the environmental clearance given to INO by the MoEFCC.
