Mullaperiyar dam: Vaiko held for staging protest

MDMK leader Vaiko and 900 party workers were arrested today when they attempted to stage a road blockade here on the Kerala-Tamil Nadu border protesting against the neighbouring state's plans to construct a new dam replacing the 114-year-old Mullaperiyar dam.
     
Traffic was affected for more than one hour due to the picketing programme during which Vaiko and others were arrested, police said.
     
Vaiko threatened to intensify agitation and block nine inter-state entry points on the border if Kerala went ahead with its plans, which, according to him, would lead to denial of water to Tamil Nadu.
     
Kerala's argument that the existing dam was extremely unsafe was not based on facts, he said.
     
The dam, located in Kerala but administered by Tamil Nadu, has been a long-standing dispute between the two states and the matter is pending before the Supreme Court.
     
While Kerala is of the view that the 114-year-old dam was "critically unsafe" and posed a grim threat to nearly five million people living downstream, Tamil Nadu has persistently refused to accept it and wanted the storage level to be increased from 136 feet to 142 feet.
     
The Kerala government had recently completed a techno-ecological survey of the location where it was planning to build the new dam.