✍️ Petition: make Mullaperiyar safe within a year — without Tamil Nadu losing a drop

What we are asking for

The Mullaperiyar dam is 131 years old, built in lime-surkhi masonry, on a seismically active site, with 44 crore cubic metres of water above roughly 35 lakh people and a chain of dams below it. Serious institutions have raised its condition on the record for forty years (CWC 1979, CESS 2001, IIT Roorkee 2009, IIT Delhi, CSMRS 2011, UNU-INWEH 2021). A new dam, on Kerala's own estimate, needs Tamil Nadu's agreement first and then five years to build. With the climate doing what it is doing, we do not have five years to wait.

We ask both Governments and the Centre to take up, together and on a fast track, the following, which keeps every drop of Tamil Nadu's water flowing and removes the hazard for Kerala:

1. Supply Tamil Nadu from Pamba and Kakki instead of from behind the old wall. Kerala's Pamba (986 m) and Kakki (980 m) reservoirs sit higher than the Periyar lake (~870 m) and are already joined by a tunnel. A small pump at Pamba (lift ~13 m plus friction) and a 14–25 km surface pipe along the hillside — laid on the ground, with animal crossings, no road, no tree cutting — carries the water to the Periyar lake, along its shore, sunk to the lake bed, and by gravity into the same tunnel that supplies Tamil Nadu today. In dry months a second small pump lifts Kakki water up the existing tunnel into Pamba.
2. Same water, same tunnel, same power station, same canals. Tamil Nadu's five districts — Theni, Madurai, Dindigul, Sivaganga, Ramanathapuram — receive the same quantity through the same conduit to the same Periyar power station and canals. Tamil Nadu loses nothing.
3. Power stage: Francis turbines at the 126 m drop into the Periyar tunnel generate about 22 MW against about 9 MW of pumping — a net gain of roughly 13 MW. The powerhouse pays for itself in about 7–8 years and keeps earning; a new dam recovers nothing.
4. Retire the old wall. Once Tamil Nadu is being supplied from Pamba, cut the old wall down in stages to the river bed. A dam cannot be "kept low" against a cloudburst; a third of its water is dead storage that nobody can use — it is only weight on a 131-year-old wall.
5. Keep Thekkady. In place of the wall, a modern roller-compacted-concrete weir 12–15 m high with an open crest across the whole valley (so it cannot hold a flood) and gated bottom sluices, opened ahead of heavy rain and closed after. The lake, the boats and the elephants at the water's edge remain; the Periyar's own water returns to Idukki, Malankara and the Muvattupuzha canals.
6. Cost and time. Feasibility estimates (±40%, to be fixed by a DPR): the safety stage is about 15–17% of the ~₹1,300 crore new-dam estimate; with the powerhouse about a quarter. With fast-tracked approvals, water from Pamba can flow within a year and the old wall can be made safe within a year to a year and a half. Kerala's cost, stated plainly: Sabarigiri generates about 1.5% less of Kerala's electricity on the water sent east.
7. First job: a ground survey. The satellite terrain used has an error of 10–15 m; the corridor and the pass must be confirmed on the ground before design.

This dam is not one state's problem. If it fails, Kerala floods and Tamil Nadu's water is gone with it. If it is simply emptied with nothing in its place, Tamil Nadu goes dark anyway. Both states win with this: Tamil Nadu loses no water, Kerala loses no lives. Even if a new dam is built one day, this must be done first.

Technical basis: solution video (2024) and the 2026 episode on this site's YouTube channel; dam-break model at mullaperiyar.online/map. Prepared by Reuben C Kuruvilla (BE Mech), Tree of Life – Climate Solutions, a project of Angelstar Enterprises Pvt Ltd. Figures are feasibility-level estimates and are stated as such.