He recounts the history of the project. Just a week after the Sethusamudram Corp. Ltd (SCL) project was finalized, it ran into trouble: the tsunami came. Two months after the tsunami, SCL project authorities sent a registered letter to Murty, who lives in Canada and teaches at the University of Ottawa. The letter, posted sometime in early February, reached Murty in April. “They didn’t have the correct address. It went to two-three other places before reaching me. It asked me to give my opinion on the project by 28 February. The deadline had passed, but I had been thinking about the project since January. Within the hour, I emailed my opinion,” says Murty.
He wrote that if another tsunami strikes, this channel would cause devastation on the Kerala coast: “In the 2004 tsunami, no significant amount of tsunami energy travelled to Kerala through the waters between India and Sri Lanka. The water had to take a wide turn around Sri Lanka. In this process, the water missed southern Kerala. However, if the Sethu Canal is widened and deepened, this will provide an alternative route for the Indonesian tsunamis to funnel energy into the channel. My recommendation was clear: the threat is real, realign the channel.” He also offered his services to create a computer simulation of his theory. No one has taken him up on it.
N.K. Raghupathy, the former chairman of SCL who was asked to go on leave in July and was transferred from his post last week, says he had “taken Murty to lunch to hear out his concerns”. “When I left (in July), we had been thinking about forming a team to look into the tsunami angle,” he adds. No such team has been formed so far.
“How can these people take our lives for granted?” demands V. Vinod, a fisherman in Rameshwaram, who was told about the tsunami threat by social activists from the local church. Scooping his six-year-old daughter off the beach, he asks, “How can they put us at risk? We want to be sure the next tsunami will not come here. Why don’t they find out?”
Blowing up
In this file picture, a dredger is seen in the stretch near Adam’s Bridge
Only one detailed report on this subject had been commissioned by SCL. The report, compiled by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri), Nagpur, was based on raw data provided by S. Kathiroli, director of the National Institute of Ocean Technology (Niot). As it turns out, Kathiroli was also on the board of the Dredging Corp. of India (DCI) when he was director of Niot. After the project was approved, DCI got the contract for dredging the channel for the Rs2,600 crore project. Kathiroli refused to comment on the possible conflict of interest that his dual directorship may have created.
Kathiroli’s report said there was no rock on the Ram Sethu. Earlier this year, a dredger hit a rock bed and broke its spud.
Since it is impossible to simply cut through the rock layers of Ram Sethu, the solution the government came up with was to use explosives. Rumours grew of how the government had deployed Indian Navy divers to carry out reconnaissance for the best spots to place the explosives and how there was a whole scheme to blast the bridge overnight.
If there was any such plan, the government had to abandon it quickly. In the last week of August, the Supreme Court heard, through a petition filed by Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, of the rumours and issued a special order asking the government not to damage any part of Ram Sethu until the next hearing on 14 September.