COVER STORY

A bridge too far

S.R. RAGHUNATHAN

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presses the button to unveil the plaque announcing the commencement of the Sethusamudram project in Madurai on July 2, 2005, in the presence of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, DMK chief M. Karunanidhi and Union Minister for Shipping T.R. Baalu.

THE Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project (SSCP) has seen several twists and turns in its 147-year history, but the latest twist has a touch of irony as well. In September 1998, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, heading the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government, announced at a rally organised by the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) in Chennai that the project would be implemented, but seven years later, the BJP is in the vanguard of an agitation against the alignment of the channel.

The party is demanding that the channel should not cut through Ram Sethu or Adam’s Bridge, which is a sandstone reef running from Rameswaram island in Tamil Nadu to Talaimannar in Sri Lanka. For several kilometres on either side of the submerged reef the sea is shallow, with a depth of only a little more than three metres in many places. This prevents the movement of ships and even mechanised trawlers.

It is a matter of faith for the BJP, which associates the bridge with the one described in the Ramayana, but the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the ruling party in Tamil Nadu and an ally of the Congress at the Centre, will have none of it and is determined to see the project through.

If the Congress ducked for cover after the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court that there was no proof that the structure was man-made and that there was “no historical record to prove the existence of the characters or the occurrence of events depicted” in the Ramayana, the DMK went into attack mode.

At a rally on September 15 in Erode, the home-town of E.V. Ramasami, the iconoclastic mentor of the DMK, Chief Minister and DMK president M. Karunanidhi alleged that “some foxes are conspiring to bury the project” and equated it with the attempt “to vanquish the Dravidian movement” itself.

Karunanidhi, who is an atheist, asked, “Who is that Rama? In which engineering college did he graduate to become an engineer? When did he build that bridge? Is there any evidence [to show that he built Ram Sethu]? No.” He moved a resolution at the rally demanding that the Centre should not yield to threats from “some communal forces which want to ruin the project and block the people in the South from prospering”. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) have pledged their strong support to the DMK in the implementation of the project.

The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the principal Opposition party in Tamil Nadu, has found common ground with the BJP on the issue and there are incipient indications of the two parties coming together again to fight the Lok Sabha elections due in 2009. The BJP and the AIADMK had fallen out after contesting the 2004 Lok Sabha elections as partners.

AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa had filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking that Ram Sethu be declared a national monument and that the Centre and other agencies be restrained from destroying it while executing the project. Damage to or destruction of Ram Sethu would lead to serious ecological, environmental and security concerns, she contended in the petition.

For the MDMK, an ally of the AIADMK, it was a tightrope walk. The implementation of the SSCP was a dream come true for the party, for it was at party general secretary Vaiko’s instance that Vajpayee made the announcement in 1998. But with both the BJP and the AIADMK opposing any damage to Adam’s Bridge, Vaiko said that while it was not the MDMK’s intention to hurt any religious feelings, the Centre should be firm in implementing the project.

The SSCP was launched on July 2, 2005, by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Madurai. Thousands of people who had gathered at the venue applauded as they saw on closed-circuit television a dredger of the Dredging Corporation of India throw out mud from the seabed at a point 45 km from Point Calimere in Nagapattinam district. Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Karunanidhi, who was not the Chief Minister then, were present on the occasion. Jayalalithaa, who was the Chief Minister, boycotted the function although she was invited to be “the guest of honour”.

The situation was tense in Rameswaram and fishermen across the State were out on the streets, protesting against the project. Black flags flew from every fisherman’s home at Thracepuram, the fishing centre in the heart of Tuticorin town. Fishermen on the Ramanathapuram coast (where Rameswaram is located) set out to sea in about 100 boats flying black flags.

Supporters of the project, a section of fishermen among them, advance the following arguments. Not only will the channel cut down steaming time and fuel costs, it will galvanise traffic for 15 small, neglected ports in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal. The channel will help in transmigration of fish from the Gulf of Mannar to the Palk Bay and vice versa. Today, fishing is a seasonal activity in the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Bay, but the channel would make fishing possible throughout the year in both areas. The fortunes of Tuticorin port and town will improve dramatically from the transhipment of containers that originate from or are destined for ports on the east coast of India. More than anything else, the Indian Navy needs a channel in India’s own territorial waters.

Opponents of the project, including a section of fishermen, say it will not benefit fishermen in any way because they would need big, powerful boats to go down to the “south sea” to net the catch there. They point to environmentalists’ assertions that dredging, which is a continuous activity, will kill prawns and fish and other forms of marine life.

There has been opposition on ecological grounds as well. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and informed environmentalists argue that dredging of the channel on the shallow east coast will disturb the fragile marine ecology of the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve. They say the mud being dredged up from the seabed will destroy the coral reefs and lead to the extinction of seacows, sea cucumber, prawns and a variety of marine life.

HANDOUT

A Dredging Corporation of India vessel at work in the Palk Strait soon after the official inauguration.

Nine proposals were made from 1860 to 1922 for cutting a channel through Rameswaram island or by dredging the Palk Strait for ships to pass, cutting travel time and distance between the east and west coasts of India.

Commander A.D. Taylor of the British Navy first proposed in 1860 the excavation of a channel through “Thonithurai peninsula”. The next year Townshend of Plymouth in the United Kingdom suggested the deepening of the Pamban channel near Rameswaram to allow large vessels to sail. A committee of the British Parliament, appointed in 1862 upon a request from a British official, J.D. Elphinstone, suggested that the channel could be excavated one mile west of Pamban. In 1863, Sir William Dennison, Governor of Madras and an engineer by profession, visited Pamban and made yet another proposal (Frontline, May 12, 2000).

More proposals followed, including one from John Code in 1884 for digging a channel for the South Indian Ship Canal Port and Coaling Station. In 1902, a proposal from the South Indian Railway Company endorsed Code’s plan. In 1922, Robert Bristow, Harbour Engineer for the Government of India, came up with an alternative route. All these proposals never got off the ground.

After Independence there was no let up in the vigorous demand of political parties in Tamil Nadu for the implementation of the SSCP. Traders and industrialists in Tuticorin, too, lobbied hard for it. In December 1955, the Government of India set up the Sethusamudram Project Committee with Dr. A. Ramaswami Mudaliar as its chairman and it pronounced the project viable. Although it recommended that “the Sethusamudram Ship Canal Project and Tuticorin Harbour Project are closely inter-related and that they should be executed as part of one and the same project and should be completed during the Second Five-Year Plan”, the recommendation fell on deaf ears.

Nothing happened in the Third Five-Year Plan either. It looked as if the project might see the light of the day in the Fourth Plan. After the Tuticorin Harbour Project was sanctioned in 1963, the Union Cabinet recommended on September 12, 1963, that the SSCP be included among the projects for “advance action” under the Fourth Plan.

A committee was set up in 1964 with Union Transport Secretary Nagendra Singh as chairman and its project report recommended the execution of the SSCP in tandem with the Tuticorin Harbour Project. It proposed the cutting of a channel through Rameswaram town. Let alone in the Fourth Plan, the SSCP did not find a mention even in the Fifth Five-Year Plan (Frontline, May 12, 2000).

There were more reports, including one from J.I. Coilpillai, retired Chief Engineer of the Tamil Nadu Public Works Department and Administrator, Tuticorin Harbour Project, and another from H.R. Lakshmi Narayanan. The project remained a non-starter but all political parties in Tamil Nadu kept up the pressure for its implementation. In 1986, the Tamil Nadu Assembly unanimously passed a resolution demanding the execution of the SSCP.

The execution became a reality when Manmohan Singh inaugurated the project in July 2005. Sethusamudram Corporation Limited, a special purpose vehicle, is in charge of dredging the channel, which will be 167 km long, 300 metres wide and 12 metres deep and is estimated to cost Rs.2,427 crore. The Tuticorin Port Trust is the nodal agency for executing the project (Frontline, July 29, 2005).

After Independence, six alignments were proposed for the channel. The sixth is the one that is being executed. It will cut through Adam’s Bridge and will be 35 km long in the Adam’s Bridge area, 54 km in the Palk Strait and 78 km in the Palk Bay. There will be no dredging in the Palk Bay because of its natural depth (Frontline, July 29, 2005).

Incidentally, one of the proposed alignments was dropped because it would have meant dismantling the Kothandaramaswamy temple situated off Rameswaram town. Legend has it that Rama crowned Vibhishana, Ravana’s brother, the king of Sri Lanka at the spot where the Kothandaramaswamy temple stands.

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