MADBAN VILLAGE (Ratnagiri): A 14-member team of the ministry of environment and forest (MoEF) finished inspecting the proposed site for India's largest nuclear power plant (10,000 mega watt), which is to come up in this scenic coastal village, in less than two hours on Thursday afternoon.
As declared, the team did not meet the villagers who have been opposing the project for the past five years. However government sources said that there was nothing wrong with the visit which was a site inspection trip of the MoEF expert assessment team. Union minister for environment Jairam Ramesh had promised the villagers that the environment clearance for the project would be given only after all the doubts of the villagers had been answered.
The nuclear plant which is to come up in the form of six reactors of 1,650 mega watt each, manufactured by the French firm AREVA, is slated to come up between a large grassy plateau and the shore.
The MoEF team which came in a luxury bus under police escort, was spotted going to the plateau at 10.30 am. It left the site at 1 pm. Since it takes an hour to reach the shore from the laterite plateau which has no roads, villagers estimated that the expert team would have had less than half an hour for inspection. "We learnt that the expert team was accompanied by officials of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India. In all fairness, they should have met us also," said Pravin Gawankar, president of Janhit Seva Manch Samiti, Madban. "This only strengthens our suspicions that the government is trying to hide something," he added.
"The Indian government is obviously in a hurry to clear this project before the visit of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy in December," said Satyajit Chavan of the Konkan Vinashkari Prakalp Virodhi Samiti, which is also opposing the host of thermal power plants that are coming up in the two coastal districts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg.
Only a handful of the villagers have accepted the compensation cheques and the rest are resolutely opposed to the nuclear plant on environmental grounds. One of their objections is that Konkan is in the seismic zone 3 and is prone to earthquakes. On Dussehra, the villagers defied prohibitory orders and lit bonfires of the new compensation package announced by state revenue minister Narayan Rane whose son Nilesh is the MP from Sindhudurg-Ratnagiri.
The police is now using this incident to round up activists of the Samiti before the 'Jail Bharo' agitation of the villagers on Friday. "The police have raked up some old and concocted cases against our activists to prevent us from gathering in large numbers," said Gawankar. The police had come to arrest him too when he was speaking at the rally at the fishing village of Tulsunde on Thursday afternoon. But he got wind of it and escaped by boat.
Source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
