Chennai:
Activists on Saturday welcomed Tamil Nadu government’s decision to suspend the coal bed methane project in Thanjavur and Tiruvarur districts and warned that any industrial projects in the ‘rice bowl’ of Tamil Nadu would endanger the food security of the state besides consigning the area into a salt pan.
Discussing the issue during at the Centre for Law. Policy and Human Rights Studies, activists while citing the international experience stated that the project would affect the ecology of the entire area, which in turn would result in slow death of agriculture.
V Suresh, Supreme Court advisor to the state on food security and General Secretary of People’s Union for Civil Liberties said that the National Food Security Bill would hamper public distribution system in Tamil Nadu by causing a deficit of 1 lakh tonnes of rice.
“And if the scheme is being implemented in the area it will cause irreparable damage and may even result in food crisis,” he said.
Interestingly, the activists are planning to form a multi-group citizen committee to study the impact of the coal bed methane project. This also comes on the wake of state government forming a multi-disciplinary experts’ committee to study adverse impact of the project.
Activists alleged that hydraulic fracturing of the area to extract methane could impact the oxygen intake of the plants besides the water, which will be extracted to get the methane out, would have high content of sodium as well as other metals that could harm the agriculture. Not only that any industrial activity would endanger the agriculture production in the area
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