Mekedatu dam issue: TN govt to face matter legally, says CM

Salem: The Tamil Nadu government remained steadfast on Tuesday in its opposition to the Rs 5,912-crore reservoir proposed by Karnataka on the Cauvery river at Mekedatu, saying it would face the matter legally.

“Our stand is that at no cost should a reservoir be constructed at Mekedatu. During droughts in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka refused to release water even for drinking purposes, despite adequate storage in the dams there,” Chief Minister K Palaniswami told reporters here.

“If another dam is constructed, Tamil Nadu will be severely affected,” he pointed out.

On his Karnataka counterpart H D Kumaraswamy meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi yesterday and urging him to convene a meeting to resolve various issues raised by Tamil Nadu on the Mekedatu dam, Palaniswami said the state government had made its stand clear on the matter.

The Karnataka government has sought the Central Water Commission’s clearance of the feasibility report on the proposed Mekedatu reservoir.

But Palaniswami had recently shot off a letter to the prime minister, seeking his intervention to stop forthwith the further processing of the feasibility report.

Noting that the Supreme Court had also ruled that no reservoir could be constructed by Karnataka on the Cauvery without Tamil Nadu’s concurrence, Palaniswami said the state would face the matter legally.

On the recent CBI raids against state Health Minister C Vijayabaskar and calls for his removal from the cabinet, the chief minister said mere charges against a person did not make him guilty and that they had to be proved in a court.

Various allegations were being levelled by the Opposition, including the DMK, against the government as it was performing well and earning public accolades, he said.

“There were many allegations during the earlier DMK rule. They will come out,” he said, without elaborating.

To a query on the 2019 general elections, Palaniswami, who is the AIADMK joint coordinator, expressed confidence that his party would repeat its 2014 performance, when it had secured 37 of the 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state, under then leadership of late J Jayalalithaa.

The AIADMK was a “strong” political party in Tamil Nadu and it was because of its numbers in the Lok Sabha that the party MPs could stall the proceedings in the Lower House for over three weeks earlier on the Cauvery issue and later secure a solution, he said.

The Centre had later formed the Cauvery Management Authority, although the MPs had demanded that the Cauvery Management Board be constituted over the river water-sharing dispute.