Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has no easy task. He will have to sit across the table on November 29 in New Delhi with the warring governments of two UPA-allies — DMK in Tamil Nadu and the CPM-Left in Kerala — over the Mullaperiyar dam row. Their stand-off over the 110-year-British-made masonry dam, built with tonnes of lime, mortar, sugar cane juice and the white of many eggs, has been in the making for some 27 years now.

The dam’s waters have been going to Tamil Nadu’s thirsty southern districts for over a century. It has helped turn some 17 lakh acres of arid land in the rain shadows into green farms, erased memories of once-frequent famines and deep penury, even checked the migration of the hopeless to Sri Lanka. An 1895 agreement, which the British holding the then Madras province signed with the local Maharaja of Travancore, allows Tamil Nadu to have ‘all the water’ from the dam, till year 2894.

But the catch is, the dam is in Kerala, and so is the river feeding it. And it has been wanting both back. No matter if its own government had re-validated the original agreement in 1970 with no substantial changes, which has been condemned as a big blunder since.

Kerala, with 44 rivers of all sizes famously crisscrossing it and a lot of rain, had started realising that its own profligacy was inviting a steady water crisis, only by the late 1970s. Power crunches were common — its mainstay hydropower projects often don’t have sufficient water to make enough electricity. Idukki, where the Mullaperiyar dam is, accounts for about three-fourth of the state’s power output, and the state’s biggest hydro-power project is downstream of Mullaperiyar, with a holding capacity of around seven times more than that of the old dam, whose waters go to Tamil Nadu. And Kerala needs to produce at least 1000 MW more power in the coming years just to cope, while there’s not enough water at hand to meet even half the actual requirements of the state’s 82 lakh power consumer base.

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