Will Cauvery Delta special protection zone turn into a reality?

Days after Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami announced that his government would declare the Cauvery Delta region as Protected Special Agriculture Zone, various departments in Tamil Nadu government seem to have a lot of work to do. The cabinet met on Wednesday and approved the bill to implement chief minister’s announcement.

“We have worked on the modalities, taking opinions from each and every department concerned. It is the chief minister’s ambitious programme. We want to ensure that the legislation stands legal scrutiny, if any,” a senior officer involved in drafting the bill had told THE WEEK. The initial plan was to table the bill in the assembly on Tuesday. The bill was tabled after every aspect involving the concerns of farmers in the Delta region is taken into account, including industrial pollution, drilling, extraction of oil and natural gas. As the bill has now been passed, the entire Cauvery basin, including Thanjavur, Thiruvarur, Nagapattinam and the Cauvery blocks—Pudukottai, Karur, Trichy and Ariyalur—will not be allowed to have heavy industry and oil and natural gas extraction.

According to sources in the state secretariat, Chief Secretary K. Shanmugam has held several rounds of meetings with the officials of various other departments to finalise the aspects to be considered in the bill. Sources also said Palaniswami made this announcement only because his popularity would grow among the people in the Delta region, which was once considered an AIADMK bastion. While the bill is touted be chief minister’s pet project, it is unlikely to touch upon the proposed and existing oil wells in the Delta region.

“If the entire Cauvery basin is converted into a protected special agriculture zone, there is nothing more that which will make a farmer like me happy. But this very announcement sounds like a gimmick or a drama. We are waiting for the bill to be tabled in the assembly and passed. There are several aspects which will have to be touched upon. The government is talking about heavy industries, oil and natural gas extraction. But what happens to the existing oil wells? There were two phases of tender process that have already taken place and the third phase is all set to begin soon. Very recently, tender was issued to extract oil from agricultural farm lands in 720 places from Marakkam to Rameshwaram region,” said Illankeeran, one of the farmers association leaders in the Cuddalore region. According to him, the rice belt, including the Cauvery basin—covering 14.7 lakh hectares of farm lands—contributes to only 32 per cent of the state’s rice production.

“Most of us have already moved to cash crops from paddy due to lack of water, since last 15 years due to the Cauvery water dispute,” said Illankeeran. It may be recalled that the government, very recently, signed a pact with Vedanta Limited. In May 2019, the environment and forest ministry granted Terms of Reference to carry out environment impact report to Cairn Oil & Gas vertical of Vedanta Limited. It was given permission to carry out drilling a total of 274 offshore and onshore sites in Nagapattinam, Karaikal, Villupuram, Puducherry and the Bay of Bengal. It is to be noted that it was in January that the Union government made an announcement that it can take up any farm land without public hearing.

“There is a oil well near my farm. We have lost ground water resources in the area. The nearby farm lands have gone dry. We do not know what will happen next. The ONGC authorities come once in a while inspect the well and go,” said 47-year-old Ponnaiah, a farmer in Kathiramangalam, which once protested against ONGC’s oil extraction. ONGC, according to the farmers, has 700 oil wells in the Cauvery Delta region.

Besides, the industries department in Tamil Nadu will be in a Catch-22 situation if the bill is passed in the assembly and becomes a legislation. The department has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) to set up a greenfield refinery in Nagapattinam, one of the important districts in the Cauvery Delta region. The MoU in fact was signed by the chief minister himself, during the second edition of the global investors meet. The project is worth Rs 27,400, which the government might have to drop once the legislation is passed. Apart from this, several other private companies, like Haldia Petrochemicals, have plans to invest Rs 50,000 crore to set up a petrochemical complex in Cuddalore, which was also inked during the Global Investors Meet.

With many such problems in place, the government is likely to constitute high level committees to discuss and draft the bill.