Underground project won’t affect TN's Mathikettan-Periyar tiger corridor, claims project director

CHENNAI: Ahead of the State Board for Wildlife (SBWL) meeting, which will be chaired by Chief Minister MK Stalin, India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) project director Gobinda Majumder has claimed that INO’s works will not affect the Mathikettan-Periyar tiger corridor. 

The extent of land for the INO project comprises 26.825 hectares of revenue land above ground and 4.62 hectares of underground land comprising tunnels and lab caverns, Majumdar said. “The surface facilities are purely restricted to the 26.825 hectares of revenue land, and they lie completely outside the adjoining reserve forest.

Hence, the surface facilities would not disturb the reserve forest or tiger corridor in any way. Of the 4.62 hectares of underground construction, the tunnel entrance begins in revenue land and the horizontal tunnel (just like a railway tunnel) gets several metres deep before it enters the forest land,” he added.  

Majumder also claimed that the tiger corridor lies completely within the forest land and no INO activity will be conducted on forest land. “Hence, there will be no obstruction to tiger movement. Whatever activity will be taken up in the forest will take place several metres below the surface. Note that about 3 hectares of the 4.62 hectares forest land will overlap with the demarcation of the tiger corridor above ground. Again, we highlight that the diversion of forest land is notional and there will never be any construction or activity in forest land, only deep under it,” he reiterated.  

The project director assured that INO is committed to creating a model project with no damage to the environment, no displacement or obstruction to local people and their daily activities, and no radioactivity or toxic emission. “We believe that such a project will also be an opportunity for students in Tamil Nadu and other parts of India to work on cutting edge technology in a world-class project,” Majumder further said. 

When contacted, State Forest Department officials said that a proper scientific Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) study was not held to establish that the INO project will not be hazardous to the environment. “It’s a first of its kind project involving blasting of rocks and tunnelling works. There will be peripheral disturbances. The demarcation of tiger corridor by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) is only notional.

The corridor used by tigers may include the adjacent revenue lands as well, for which ground truthing (validating information directly, especially by direct observation on the ground, rather than by interpretation of remotely obtained data) is needed. Any disturbance to this corridor will affect the big cat population in several critical habitats of Western Ghats,” one of the officials said.    

Meanwhile, a source in the Environment and Forests Department told Express that Chief Minister MK Stalin’s schedule was sought recently to plan a SBWL meeting. “The INO project will be discussed in the next SBWL meeting which may happen in the first or second week of July. The wildlife clearance application will be formally rejected by the SBWL and forwarded to National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) for a final decision,” the source said. Stalin has already asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to drop the INO project proposal in Tamil Nadu.   

Meanwhile, several scientists and academics had recently written to Stalin urging him to go ahead with the INO project, stating that the construction and operation would be safe and there would be no hazards to the populace. In the letter, the signatories note that the neutrinos are ‘shy and non-interactive and hence absolutely harmless’. Renowned subject matter experts and scientists such as Prof Arthur B McDonald and Prof Takaaki Kajita; Distinguished Visiting Researcher at Perimeter Institute, Canada and IIT Madras G Baskaran; and former IMSc professor TR Govindarajan were amongst the signatories in the letter.