Blueprint blues

Sethusamudram ghost in Puducherry machine

The major problem with the Puducherry port project is the ad hoc manner of its conception--evidenced by the short-circuiting of inconvenient procedural requirements, the cursory manner in which the eia was carried out, the reluctance to engage with the public about its pros and cons. But that is, in turn, embedded in a larger problem that has to do not so much with the details in which the devil resides but in an overall plan for coastal development that is flawed.

At the centre of this plan is the Sethusamudram behemoth, which envisages cutting a channel between India and Sri Lanka by dredging the Palk Strait to cut travel time for ships. The Sethusamudram project aims to dredge the shallow northern part of the Palk Strait and Adam's Bridge, an underwater ridge, which makes the channel un-navigable. The idea is to provide a shorter route connecting the east and west coasts of India by obviating the necessity of circumnavigating Sri Lanka.Integral to this plan is the development of a series of ports along both the coasts. Like other new ports, Puducherry will be dependent on the Sethusamudram project, a fact admitted by Valsaraj.

Same problems
That's not very good news, because Sethusamudram has been dogged by precisely the same kind of problems as the deep-water port in Puducherry: tendering controversies and questions of viability and environmental assessment, pre-eminently (see 'Short circuit', Down To Earth, March 15, 2006). What's worse is that the channel doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

A public sector company, the Dredging Corporation of India (dci), which has been commissioned to dredge the area, has not been spectacularly successful. The work on the first section of the straits is near completion but just over 2 per cent of the work has been completed on Adam's Bridge, where 35-km stretch has to be dredged to remove approximately 48 million cu m of silt. Till April 19, 2007, dci had managed to remove only about 1 million cu m of silt. So the end-2008 deadline looks distinctly dodgy. The work on the second section of the Palk Strait is yet to begin. Frequent breakdown of equipment has been a major stumbling block.

R Ramesh, who has been studying the project since its inception, says another important reason for the slow progress is that the agencies concerned did not undertake the kind of research on sub-surface geology that was necessary. "The eia prepared by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute does not talk about the subsurface strata, which is a major hurdle for the development of the canal," he says.

And that is of a piece, other experts point out, with the spadework for the whole project. From the economics to the engineering, the ecological fallout to the livelihood impact, shoddy research casts a cloud on its future and effectiveness.