Historical Validity of Mullaperiyar Project

This historical analysis of the Periyar project questions the arguments and some of the contemporary claims made about the project's engineering and construction, and its environmental impact. Far from being an environmentally destructive project, this was a "pacifist" scheme when it was built. The article throws light on these issues by analysing historical documents.

R Seenivasan (r.seenivasan@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate at the School of Law, University of Westminster, London.

Controversies surrounding the Periyar dam have acquired different dimensions over time. New claims have been made that the original conception of the project itself was an environmentally harmful idea. For Ramaswamy R Iyer, a proponent of such a theory, the dam appears to be a case of hubristic and maximalist engineering and a bad example,¹ and he raises some basic questions about the planning and the need for the dam itself.² These arguments resemble in many ways the theories advanced by historians³ studying north and east Indian floodplains. Without making any statements on these studies, this article examines the merits of similar arguments advanced by Iyer.
This article uses Periyar project documents, district manuals and gazetteers of the times, and engineering histories written by “engineers” on the project. It argues that whatever was done by the British in Vaigai and Periyar was an extension of the possibilities that existed in irrigation engineering at the time. These examples of engineering and planning cannot be solely ascribed to the European way of science and engineering.
How True Are These Claims?
It is true that building the Periyar dam had no precedence in engineering and was an extraordinary effort for its time. In the late 19th century, the project generated great interest among engineers, geographers, administrators and revenue officials. The number of proposals and plans made⁴ about the Periyar project itself is an indication of an intense and passionate debate about using natural resources. The project, unlike many other contemporary projects, had to undergo vetting by several agencies of the time and took nearly 11 years to get approved by the British government. While there is no doubt that land revenue generation was a major consideration, the project was also put forth as a famine control measure⁵ and for the social development of certain denotified castes that lived in the area.
The project invited attention from around the world, and was watched carefully for its results. For example, the Royal Geographic Society’s monthly journal reported about the difficulties and benefits of this endeavour in the following words:

The difficulties of the undertaking were increased by the nature of the country – jungle-clad, malarious, and uninhabited–and the altitude (2800 feet) to which the materials had to be dragged up steep slopes with an average gradient of 1 in 15, four large unbridged rivers also having to be crossed on the way from the nearest railway station. Water-power was utilized in the work wherever possible, and altogether the best economy of force was practised, with a result that the total cost of this beneficent undertaking has been less than half a million sterling at the present rate of exchange, on which outlay the direct profits should yield a handsome return (The Society 1895: 567).

The dam construction used mostly local ingredients such as stone and lime sourced nearby. Very few machineries and iron works came from Europe. The project had three main components – the dam and lake on the hills, a tunnel to transmit, and channels inside the Vaigai basin. Local technicians, artisans and labourers from the neighbouring districts of Tamil Nadu were engaged (Mackenzie 1899).
Hubristic and Maximalist Engineering?
A cursory reading of the original papers and proposals for the Periyar made by Pennycuick and his predecessors reveals that the overall aim of the project was to bring water from the Periyar river to the Vaigai river. All of them agreed to use the existing river, anicuts and tanks to realise the irrigation. Both the rivers originate in the Western Ghats with the difference being that the Periyar flowed west and the Vaigai flowed east. By transporting water from Periyar to Vaigai, the final and approved project proposed was intended to irrigate 75,000 acres in the then Madurai district. To achieve such a big area under a single irrigation project, it proposed to use the entire existing infrastructure: the River Vaigai, river channels, anicuts, other channel networks and tanks (Pennycuick 1886).
The weir of the dam was designed in such a way as to connect three hills. The main dam is 1,200 feet long. The maximum height of masonry construction at a given place is 162 feet (equals a 10-storeyed building) including the parapet. There is also a baby dam in order to create a long weir for quick disposal in the case of flooding. The reservoir when full up to 152 feet submerges 6,534 acres. The reservoir holds 15.56 tmcft (thousand million cubic foot) of water at this stage. Of this volume, 9.8 tmcft is usable and 5.7 tmcft remains in the gorge forever, making the lake. A 5,700-foot long tunnel drilled into the hills conveys the water into Vaigai.
The reservoir was named as Periyar lake after the river. Arthur Cotton, a votary of the project, called it as Periyar tank in his grand list of irrigation projects in India (Cotton 1900).
Once the tunnel released the water, it directly flowed into the Vaigai. After flowing for 138 km, the waters were measured and picked up at Peranai, an anicut built before the 10th century.⁶ The newly excavated Periyar Main Canal conveyed Periyar waters for the next 61 km and delivered it into 12 branch channels and many distributaries. Most of these distributaries pre-existed, with the project altering their carrying capacities and alignments, thereby ensuring a measured delivery of water to the intended areas. All the branch channels ended up in big tanks, and drained any excess floods into the Vaigai. All of these tanks are centuries old and the project has nothing to do with them. These tanks alone constitute around 65% of the total Periyar-Vaigai irrigated area.
Environmentally Destructive?
The project acquired a total of 8,100 acres of forestlands and needed to be compensated by the British. The compensation was not merely meant for the land for the reservoir, as many would think, rather it was for the “economic value of water”.⁷ The main environmental damage, if any, would be the submergence of land under water. Let us examine what were the environmental consequences of the project on the hills. When water stands at 152 feet at the full reservoir level (FRL), the water spread extends to 6,500 acres of forestlands. A small hill 420 feet long was chiselled to make the weir on the dam’s side. No one lived there, and there was no displacement. The submerged area of 6,500 acres may well equal the area of a single revenue village in present-day Tamil Nadu or Kerala. The hill that was chiselled (not demolished, as some believe) to make way for the weir is minuscule compared to the many hills that were razed to mine granite and stone for housing.⁸
No “twisting” and “turning” like a pipeline, as Iyer claims, was ever done. It was a pacifist project in every sense and used the same river course, existing channels, and ancient tanks without disturbing the systems. It is very difficult to understand what would be a “minimalist” project, if Periyar is not. There is no basis for asserting such a pacifist project as environmentally “horrendous”.
On the contrary, the Periyar project has created a natural reserve and a lake, providing water throughout the year. Today, it is one of India’s famed tiger and elephant reserves, inviting animals to live and humans to enjoy the surroundings. All this talk of destruction and environmental damage is devoid of any verifiable facts. In a way, contrary to Iyer’s assertions, Periyar was a great experiment in engineering to utilise the natural rivers without actually twisting, turning or damming them in full.
Origin of Periyar Project
Many like Iyer tend to believe the Periyar project was conceived by some European Victorian minds driven by scientific thinking to conquer nature. Linking the Periyar with the Vaigai was conceived long before the British conquered that part of present-day India. It was an idea of those “natives” from the far away Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) kingdom located at the tail end of the Vaigai river. It was a proposal of the natives, discovered by the colonialists, for their benefits. Nelson (1868), in his Madura manual, citing an engineering report made by C R Markham, recorded:

in 1798 ‘Mutu-akula-allay,⁹ the energetic Pradani or minister of Ramnad, whose name is still remembered by the people, determined to renew the efforts made by former ministers [emphasis added]; and for this purpose sent some intelligent natives to examine the practicability of opening a channel for turning the Periyar into the Kambam valley. They reported that the construction of a dam would secure an abundant supply of water to all the Districts through which the Veigei [Vaigai] flows, and the project continued to be eagerly discussed, until two years afterwards the idea was taken up by the then Collector of Madura’ (ibid: 55 of Part V).

The above quote is from an official British record that was meant to educate the colonial officers to better know their subjects. Nelson, the author, was not another ordinary civil servant, rather, a civil and judicial magistrate well versed in the local language, customs and practices. He was also a legal scholar who challenged the established understanding of the Hindu law of the times and was conversant with the differences between the north and south Indian understanding of Hindu law. He was a man of details and thoroughness. His manual was considered a precursor to the many district gazetteers that followed later in the Madras Presidency areas. Therefore, he may not be wrong in attributing a grand idea to the natives who were defeated and suppressed after a series of wars. There is other evidence available about the project being a native idea from colonial records.
Readers must know where Ramnad is to understand the grand thinking of the natives. Ramnad kingdom lies at the tail end of the Vaigai. Waters from Periyar, if diverted, would be released at the head end of the river, and would reach Ramnad territory after crossing Madurai and Sivaganga, two different kingdoms at the time of the original proposal. Yet, the minister of Ramnad was said to have negotiated with Travancore to build a dam in a faraway territory with which it shared no borders. If the transfer were to be successful, Periyar waters would travel more than 200 km before touching the boundary of his kingdom. The rulers of Ramnad might well have been aware of these facts and yet planned and made financial proposals for it. However, the political situation of the country was not in their favour and they could not achieve it.
By the time the minister of Ramnad was assessing the project, his kingdom was greatly disturbed and destabilised by a series of wars with the rulers of Mysore, Hyderabad, and finally with the British. This is one of the regions that had witnessed a series of wars in the previous 100 years. By 1803, the British had got overall control of the region and had subjugated them. Ramnad kingdom had fought the British till the very end and had won mostly by intrigue, later becoming a feudatory estate. The remnants of the dissident rulers who could fight no more wars were converted into zamindars, dignified revenue collectors with very little or no political powers. Therefore, Ramnad could not stake a claim when the British started building the dam. The British undertook the project for the benefit of the ryotwari areas in Madurai, with which their bureaucratic rulers had to deal directly.
According to various documents, the project took nearly a century to realise its full benefits. The first formal investigations were commenced in 1802 by the district collector of Madurai. Different technical and financial proposals were made until 1886, by the time it was finalised. The dam was built during 1887-95. The last of the major works, fitting the shutters in the Peranai regulator, was done in 1899.
Transboundary Water Conveyance
In order to benefit the many thousands of tanks, transferring of water from one basin to another was done for a very long time. Such transfers required breaking the natural basin boundaries through training the natural rivers and forming channels. It was done on a large scale in the Vaigai region. The supplies of every river (including the Vaigai) in this part were fully harvested using the tanks. This is a historic phenomenon and not one of British origin. Father Martin, a missionary in 1713, observed this phenomenon of transferring waters in the following words:

Nowhere have more precautions been taken than in Marava not to let a drop of water escape and to collect all the water formed by the rains in brooks and torrents. Here, there is to be seen a pretty large river called Vaigaiyaru. After crossing a part of Madurai, it enters Marava, and when its bed is full, which ordinarily happens a whole month every year, it is as large as the Seine. Yet, by means of canals dug by our Indians far away from their tanks, this river is so drained on all sides that it loses itself entirely and does not reach its mouth till it has spent several weeks in filling the reservoirs towards which it is diverted (Raghavaiyangar 1898: 7).

The area referred to as “Marava” lies in all the three basins – Vaigai, Sarugani and Gundar – and the water was conveyed from the Vaigai. Even today, the river Vaigai continues to feed these two adjoining river basins, Gundar in the south and Sarugani in the north.
Hundreds of tanks that are small and big are fed by channels taking off from the Vaigai. As an example, in the north, the Rajasingamangalam tank was conceived as a balancing reservoir to store the flood flows of the Vaigai. This tank connects both the Vaigai and Sarugani rivers and is capable of absorbing floods from both the rivers and designed to feed 72 smaller tanks. In the same way, in south Madakulam, one of the biggest tanks in the region is directly fed from the Vaigai through a channel. After these transfers for centuries, the tanks in this region were in need of water.
The geography of this part of the country needs some understanding. Tamil Nadu and Kerala are separated by the Western Ghats, which are steep but narrow, witnessing huge rainfall. Francis (1906) summarised the 19th century rainfall patterns and the water requirements as inadequate to fill the tanks of Madurai.¹⁰ The variations of rainfall between the western parts of the Vaigai basin bordering the Ghats and the eastern valley are very high, which results in high uncertainty of inflows into the Vaigai. Nelson described the Vaigai as follows.

so irregular, indeed, are its periodical fillings, that they can never be predicted with any certainty, or relied upon with any safety. When it rains at Madura, there will very possibly be no rain on the mountains: and consequently no freshes in the river. And when Madura is suffering from drought, there may be torrents of rain in Kumbum and Varshanad [in the Western Ghats] (Nelson 1868: 17 of Part I).

People in the region were aware of surpluses on the western side of the mountains that may have been useful to fill their tanks that were on the eastern side. That surplus source in this case was the River Periyar. This was not hubristic thinking, but very practical.¹¹
According to Nelson, in the ryotwari areas¹² of Madurai, there were 5,688 tanks, of which many were fed by 508 river channels, 27 spring channels and 376 anicuts, and irrigated an area of 1,82,887 acres (1868: 142-43 of Part V). At the time of Nelson’s writing, the Vaigai river was about 250 km long, but had only four masonry anicuts, of which two were of no use. Of the functioning anicuts, the first one, the Peranai, was essentially to head up the river to create a gravity flow into a channel. This channel, named as Vadakarai, on the north bank joins the river after filling a few tanks. The second anicut, Thenkarai, on the south bank was to transfer water to the tanks in the adjoining Gundar river basin. All other channels were temporary and seasonal. The 376 anicuts were on the smaller streams and rivulets that were used to divert water into the tanks.
These 5,688 tanks were in three different river basins – Vaigai, Gundar and Sarugani. However, Vaigai remained an important source to support them. About this, Nelson wrote,

the irrigation of the district depends mainly on the amount of water which comes down the Veigei [Vaigai], and probably the only kind of work by which it would be possible to greatly advance the agricultural interests of the country would be one planned to make the Veigei more useful than it is. Such a work is now under consideration (1868: 54 of Part V).

The consideration referred to by Nelson was to link the Periyar with the Vaigai. At the time of his writing this, the Periyar project was still at the drawing-board stage.
Need for Additional Water
The demand for water in the Vaigai region always remained high. In Nelson’s words,

There are no natural lakes or pools in any part of the Madura District. Wherever, water may be seen, it is quite sure to be water that has been stored up artificially: and if he go from the Palanis [in the western ghats] to the sea-coast [Bay of Bengal], a traveller will never come across a natural reservoir of even the very smallest size (1868: 20 of Part I).

All tanks in this part of the country are man-made and developed to utilise the undependable and meagre rainfall. Attempts to link these tanks with many local streams and rivers were taken up continuously.¹³ There is every reason to believe that the conception of the Periyar project by the Ramnad kingdom has its basis in this understanding of linking their tanks to stronger sources of supply. After all, the Periyar flowed in the ancient Tamil kingdom of the Cheras, which was known as the land of the Periyar.¹⁴
It appears from the literary evidence that the Vaigai had been completely utilised with very limited surplus flowing into the sea as far back as the 12th century. There are stark differences in the descriptions of the Vaigai in Tamil poetry dated between the second and the 12th century. Poems in Paripatal, dated second century, describe the copious floods of the Vaigai. Major themes of these musical poems include the taming of the river by its citizens, filling up tanks with river water, and saving the bunds of rivers and tanks from breaches.
By the 12th century, the river seems to have been fully harvested with less water flowing into the sea. An archaeological report made on a village located at the tail end of the Vaigai recorded, “By the 12th century AD (or even earlier) it had ceased to join the sea” (Sridhar et al 2005: 2). The barren river did not escape even the sarcasm of the Tamil poets. Poets from the rival Chola kingdom even ridiculed the river as an “emaciated damsel” who does not want to meet her lover – the sea.
Tamil poetry has several references to the construction of tanks. Surprisingly, the hundreds of inscriptions dated after 10th century, refer mainly to tank repairs, extending the channels, building new weirs and sluices. There are not many inscriptions detailing any construction of new tanks. Sarcasm about the lack of flows in the Vaigai is very common. Today, unlike any other river of its size, the Vaigai does not have any delta worthy of mention and it does not reach the sea, rather draining into a tank called Ramanad Big Tank.
However, the Madurai region faced nine famines during the 19th century and invited the attention of various commissions including the Famine Commission and the Irrigation Commission as a famine prevention project. Hence, the Periyar project was seen as essential to supplement the much needed water for the Madurai region.
Conclusions
In every sense, the Periyar project remained a pacifist one based on the understanding of using rivers, anicuts, natural channels and tanks. Unlike many other projects of this nature, the Periyar project has resulted in creating almost four times the original intended irrigation benefits.
All this goes to show how knowledge about the local natural history, engineering and agricultural practices, rather than any conquering mindset, enabled the British engineers to go forth with the project. As evident from the plentiful writing in colonial reports, the British had understood that no alternatives existed other than bringing water from a different basin. Hence, they embarked upon a project to build a dam across the River Periyar, an idea of the natives. All the environmental hazards were well understood from the planning stage and the project was executed causing no harm to the local environment.