Who is fishing in troubled kknpp waters

Site director at the power station, Mr Kashinath Balaji, sports a worried look these days. As one of the most vociferous protests against nuclear power in the country during recent times enters its third month in Koodankulam, the leader of the protests S. Udayakumar, a year-old schoolteacher turned anti-nuclear activist, remains as enigmatic as the force that propels the stir.

While the intelligence agencies and rival groups are busy probing his connections with foreign agents and the flow of funds to channel the protests, Udayakumar dismisses the claims as official propaganda. I have been campaigning for peace and disarmament since my early youth. This movement is a public uprising of which I am a part. Born in a small time political family in Nagercoil, Udayakumar completed his post graduation in English Literature and moved to Ethiopia to teach English.

Although several local politicians including former Radhapuram MLA have been fighting for two decades for banning the power project, none could gather the kind of support Udayakumar has mustered. The government is making a false claim that nuclear power can fill the energy gap in the country.

A sterilised area up to 5 km around the plant shall be established by administrative measures where the growth of population will be restricted for effective implementation of emergency measures.

Natural growth, however, is allowed in this zone. In fact, there are no restrictions on natural growth of population in the sterilized zone. The operation of nuclear power plants in the country at the coastal locations at TAPS, Tarapur in Maharashtra and MAPS at Kalapakkam in Tamilnadu has also not shown any adverse effects on marine life including the fish.

These studies have not found any adverse effect on marine ecology around the nuclear power plant sites. An Environmental Survey Laboratory ESL is set up at the site before the start of operation of the reactors, which collects data of several environmental matrices like air, water, soil, vegetation, crops, fish, meat, etc.

It establishes a baseline. The experience over the last 40 years has been that at such distances no significant increase in radiation levels above the baseline data is found at Indian nuclear power plant sites.

The safety features of Kudankulam project have been comprehensively reviewed by a task force of NPCIL in the context of the recent Fukushima accident and it has been found that the safety features of the reactor are adequate to withstand such extreme natural events.

Kudankulam site is located in the lowest seismic hazard zone of the country, Zone-II. The nearest epicenter of a recorded earthquake was located near Trivandrum, which is situated at a distance of 88 km north- northwest of the Kudankulam site, where two earthquakes corresponding to 4. And salt mines that raise the salinity of the soil, destroying mangrove forests, which leads to further erosion.

Despite the dangers posed by the Sri Lankan Navy, the fishermen persist in their jobs. So fishermen belong to a particular caste. They will do the fishing until the fish are gone. Or until the fishermen are tortured or killed, as has happened all too often. One of his photographs depicts a man with a plastic bag over his head, as he describes a torture process in which diesel fuel was poured over the bag before members of the Sri Lankan Navy threatened to light his head on fire.

But rather than present the fishermen as blameless, Mr. Lakshmanan was quick to point out why the Sri Lankans are so angered by the poaching. Apparently, the Tamil Nadu fishermen use a technique called bottom trawling, which has been banned in Sri Lanka but not India. In this type of fishing, nets are dragged along the seabed, which destroys fragile Sri Lankan coral reef ecosystems.

This was confirmed earlier in the year by Dr. In the future there will be no fish left in the North. Ironically, most of the catch for which these Tamil Nadu fishermen risk their lives is then shipped out internationally or to the voracious urban markets in India.

From there comes the sewage that pollutes the water, forcing the fish further out to sea where the fishermen follow, to their peril. It is a baroque tale that befits our intricately woven globalized society and perhaps a harbinger of larger resource wars to come. When asked if he might utilize a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter to help further the project, he demurred saying that system was poorly established in India.