It would seem the most natural thing to have a channel that cuts the sailing time from the east to the west coast and the west coast to the east by a day and saves a distance of about five hundred nautical miles. And yet, the proposed Sethusamudram Shipping Channel Project (SSCP) could turn out India’s worst environmental nightmare, potentially deplete thorium reserves, risk a LTTE-Indian Navy confrontation drawing India unwillingly into Sri Lanka’s civil war, and become a financial liability.
The Centre and the Tamil Nadu government insist that SSCP will bring international shipping traffic to the Tuticorin Port. The Port is situated in the Gulf of Mannar/ Palk Bay/ Palk Strait (GoMPBPS) area where the maritime boundaries of India and Sri Lanka meet. Presently, oceanliners skip Tuticorin and instead anchor at Colombo because GoMPBPS has an average draught of 7.5 metres. Almost in the middle of this area lies a sandstone reef called Ramar Bridge (Adam’s Bridge) where the draught shallows to less than three metres.
SSCP conceives dredging a one hundred and sixty seven kilometre long, twelve metre deep and three hundred metre wide channel in this region cutting through the Ramar Bridge, which has separately angered the Sangha Parivar. The Tamil Nadu government hopes that this channel will become an alternative, shorter sea lane to going around Sri Lanka for ships bound either for Chennai or to South East Asia and beyond.
The state government believes that with Tuticorin, about fifteen smaller ports will also benefit from international shipping in the GoMPBPS area. Off and on, security dimensions have been given to SSCP, but never very convincingly. One argument is that in an Indian Ocean war, a major rival power could prevent the Indian Western and Eastern fleet from joining up for common action, and that the SSCP could prevent this. To this writer, an Indian Navy spokesman did not deny such a scenario. But he added, “Look, the Navy has nothing to do with the project. We were not consulted at any stage. It is entirely a Shipping Ministry project.”
On one hand, this would not matter. It is no secret that the Minister of Shipping, Road, Transport and Highways, T.R.Baalu, of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), is pushing the project at the behest of the Tamil Nadu chief minister, M.Karunanidhi. Perhaps with the exception of the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (ADMK) chief, J.Jayalalithaa, no Tamil Nadu political leader or party is opposed to SSCP. All of them believe that it will miraculously turn Tuticorin into a trade hub in the region much like Singapore. Except that our researches show this won’t happen. But rather, that the project would make the peninsular region more vulnerable to tsunami and provoke unprecedented environmental degradation.
Not only is SSCP economically unviable, the well known international tsunami expert, Professor Tadepalli “Tad” S.Murthy, has warned that it would draw in any tsunami originating in the Sumatra/ Andaman Sea area to hit the west coast and most devastatingly South Kerala. More immediately, the project will kill South East Asia and South Asia’s first marine biosphere in the almost still, calm waters of the Gulf of Mannar. This biosphere is home to more than three thousand six hundred rare plant and animal species.
Four other factors should weigh in against the project. One is the confirmed heritage value of the Ramar Bridge, dated by a NASA digital image to be 17.5 lakh years old, which matches the ancient age of human settlement in Sri Lanka. Indeed, Sri Lanka sought a bridge on the stone reef to India. But the proposal came to nothing.
Second, GoMPBPS is a major sedimentation sink for the east coast. While the causes for the sedimentation are Indian/ Sri Lankan rivers and long shore currents, what makes the area a sink is perhaps the Ramar Bridge. It acts as a natural breakwater and forces ocean currents the longer way around Sri Lanka. By that token, Ramar Bridge has also made the marine biosphere possible. And now, tsunami experts by and large agree that the Bridge considerably diminished the intensity of the 26 December 2004 tsunami. While Nagappattinam north of GoMPBPS and Kanyakumari to the south were brutally impacted by the tsunami, places within the region themselves escaped more lightly.
Third, because GoMPBPS is a sedimentation sink, there is frenetic land building happening to its immediate north. Experts like G.Victor Rajamanickam, Professor of Earth Sciences at Thanjavur’s Tamil University and India's eminent coastal geo-morphologist and mineralogist, say that this land building activity will likely connect Vedaranyam to Sri Lanka’s Jaffna peninsula in another four hundred years. His studies reveal that the Palk Strait has grown shallower by an astonishing six metres between 1960 and 1986, which would suggest that this Strait is being silted in at the rate of twenty four centimetres a year. The Sethusamudram Shipping Channel Project goes against this natural land building activity, and would ravage a rare natural breakwater, and condemn the unique environment of the region.
2. The Sethusamudram canal will never make profits
Four, the project will kill the fishing industry and destroy the livelihood of about 3.5 lakh fishermen in six coastal districts of Tamil Nadu. Already, dredging activity has scared the fish to other areas, reducing catches. These waters have anyhow become dangerous for Indian fishermen. Inadvertently crossing into Sri Lankan waters, they face firing from the Sri Lankan Navy, which accuses them of smuggling arms for the Tamil Tigers. On the other hand, the Tamil Nadu police chief has newly disclosed that the LTTE has had a hand in the killing of Indian fishermen and even capturing them. With the upcoming project, the fishermen face a bleak future. While the shipping minister, Baalu, makes an unacceptable comparison between the project and alleged increases in catches with the development of the Tuticorin Port, an NGO representing the fishermen, Coastal Action Network (CAN), has filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court which is due for hearing in July. The fate of the Sethusamudram Project rests on the judgment.
The Sethusamudram Project was conceived by a British commander of the Indian Marine, A.D.Taylor, in 1860. He could well have drawn inspiration for it from the Suez Canal which was then being constructed. Nearly one and a half centuries later, India has commenced on his abandoned dream project, but any similarity it bears to the vastly profitable Suez Canal or Panama Canal projects is illusory. SSCP’s major backers, including the Tamil Nadu government and the Tuticorin Port Trust, make untenable comparisons with both Suez and Panama. While the sixty four kilometre long Panama Canal saves ships a 22,500 kilometre journey around South America, the Suez contributes an eighty six percent reduction on a trip that would otherwise have to be taken about the African continent. On the other hand, Sethusamudram cuts off sailing time of less than a day and a distance of about five hundred nautical miles, which is a negligible saving compared to the costs of using the channel, according to the calculations of a former deputy chairman of the Tuticorin Port Trust, K.S.Ramakrishnan.
Any ship using SSCP will have to pay pilotage charges. There are various ways to calculate pilotage charges. Ramakrishna’s method is simple. In his short paper of July 2005, he uses the lowest amortized pilotage charges of Chennai Port. He arrives at a figure of Rs 1.11 lakh per kilometre which a ship has to pay for pilotage. The comparable cost for Tuticorin Port, which is still recovering its capital cost on the approach channel, is more than two and a half times higher. For a channel length of Sethusamudram that would require pilotage, which Ramakrishnan fixes at fifty six kilometre, even at the lowest, amortized Chennai Port cost, a ship would end up spending eight times more than it would to go around Sri Lanka. Ramakrishna, therefore, concludes that ships won’t use the channel.
When Ramakrishnan made his calculation, SSCP had not revealed its pilotage charges. Later, almost as if to rebut Ramakrishnan, it made public its tariff plan, but used another formula. These two, that is Ramakrishnan’s conclusion and SSCP’s projections, cannot be reconciled. But in any case, Captain Balakrishnan, a retired Indian Navy frigate commander and merchant seaman, says that the bulk of international shipping, comprising vessels larger than sixty thousand tonnes, cannot use the SSCP because the draught of ten metres is inadequate.
Captain Balakrishnan says, “For international shipping, time is of the essence. Ships cannot afford to wait for pilots and berths, and it is unlikely that in a channel sixty kilometres long, pilotage will be a streamlined and time saving affair. At any rate, pilots are always in shortage. The major container vessels avoid Indian ports by and large, preferring Colombo in between Singapore and Dubai. Container feeder vessels from Colombo may use Tuticorin, but this traffic, if it at all generates, will be negligible in relation to any substantial revenues for the port. The port will make no money. In addition, this area is cyclonic. Major shippers do not like cyclonic coasts.”
Captain Balakrishnan says that GoMPBPS and further north are virtually unnavigable during the months of October to January when cyclones rage in the area. He remembers of his navy days when, on one occasion in April 1986, for thirty hours he could not see the aircraft carrier Vikrant during a cyclone. He was providing frigate escort to it. Everything on his deck was washed away. His radar would not swivel in strong winds. He also recalls in the early Nineties when an oil drilling ship broke six heavy anchors in the Cauvery basin and washed ashore because of powerful cyclonic storms. Captain Balakrishnan says that ships prefer taking the longer route around Sri Lanka even to go to Tuticorin and, at any rate, they would burn up fuel forced at a slow speed of ten knots per hour to go through the channel. “They call it the cyclonic coast, and the Sethusamudram Project will make no difference,” he says. “And let’s forget about the project making any money.”
What galls fierce critics of the Sethusamudram Project, however, is that it will sink the investments, already projected upwards of Rs 2400 crore, without any chance of recovery. In this, the Tamil Nadu government mostly covers itself, but loss makers would include the major stakeholders in the Sethusamudram Project Limited SPV, including the major port trusts and the Centre. V.Sundaram, a former IAS officer and the first chairman of the Tuticorin Port Trust, cannot reconcile to the huge costs of dredging, which would ultimately amount to nothing. “As the first chairman of the Tuticorin Port Trust, I was a member of the Lakshminarayanan Committee which was set up to examine the feasibility of the Sethusamudram Project,” says Sundaram. “We estimated the cost of dredging in 1981 at Rs 180 crore and now it is shown as Rs 2400 crore (the project dredging estimate is Rs 1719.6 crore), which will further increase. Please investigate why the dredging costs have shot up and who is making money.”
3. SSCP could degrade India’s ambitions in the Indian Ocean
Even assuming the worst that SSCP will make no money, does it redeem itself at all? One argument is that SSCP will reinforce India’s sovereign maritime territorial rights in the GoMPBPS area, although neither the Centre nor the Tamil Nadu government have ever officially taken this line. Before the government clarified, questions were raised in Sri Lanka’s parliament about the project, but its then foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, said that the SSCP alignment was in Indian waters but that anyhow India was keen to remove misapprehensions.
But a bigger threat has been cited from the United States, although significantly, the Indian government has been silent on it. In August 1976 and June 1979, the Indian and Sri Lankan governments declared the waters of the Gulf of Mannar as “historic” and those of the Palk Bay as “internal”. Rejecting this, the US Navy conducted “operational assertions” as late as 2001. On 23 June 2005, the US Department of Defence reiterated that these claims were untenable through reissue of a manual for operational assertions. Less than a month later, despite pointed warnings by the international tsunami expert, Professor Tad Murthy, the Centre and the Tamil Nadu government expeditiously commenced on the Sethusamudram Project. While again, there is no official word, it is implied that the project would warn the US Navy off the GoMPBPS area.
The US does not accept India and Sri Lanka’s “historic claim” to the Gulf of Mannar waters. In the absence of a navigable channel, the US Navy cannot do much more than show its flag, and with its growing operational burdens in the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait, and with rising tensions with Russia, it is unlikely that it will do further assertions here. In any case, the Indian Navy has the capability to bottle up any such intention, and on current account, the US claims only a friendly intent with India. North, in the Palk Bay and Palk Strait, Indian and Sri Lankan straight baseline territorial claims exceed the twelve nautical mile limit set by the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The United States has not ratified UNCLOS but insists on its right to free passage in the GoMPBPS area under UNCLOS. But SSCP is not the answer to keep the US away.
For one, SSCP is in Indian territorial waters. If the US insists, it can still force its Navy into the strip of water lying between the UNCLOS-mandated Indian and Sri Lankan claims. But with India laying historical claims over and above those granted by UNCLOS, the US would have to confront the Indian Navy, which it would not want. But in any case, this bears no connection to the SSCP. So how SSCP helps in reinforcing our territorial claims in the GoMPBPS area is an open question.
Commodore Rajeev Sawhney of the New Delhi-based National Maritime Foundation sees no connection between SSCP and any perceived threat from the United States. “In any case, SSCP lies in our territorial waters,” says Commodore Sawhney. “It would not help the government to counter US operational assertions in the area.” Adds Rear Admiral (Retired) O.P.Sharma, an expert on maritime law, “Sri Lanka is comfortable with the boundary agreement with India, so I see no reason for an US objection. The US has not ratified UNCLOS anyhow. India should not bother.” The key thing is that the Indian Navy has not been broached on this issue specific to SSCP. So, if the Indian government has a sense that somehow SSCP will assist it against the US claim, it is putting good money after a bad project.
SSCP’s second alleged advantage is that it would enable the Indian Eastern and Western fleet to quickly join in action in a contingency. The underlying apprehension, although never expressed by the Indian Navy, is that a rival power could establish in the rough area of the Gulf of Mannar and divide and take on the two fleet. The logic of this is hard to deny, and it follows on the British capture of Gibraltar in The War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century which denied the French the advantage of having fleet in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean Sea. The Indian Navy spokesman told this writer that there wasn’t much strategic basis to this, although there was no deny that a channel would cut sailing distance and time.
Captain Balakrishnan more forthrightly rejects any strategic setback to the Navy not having the Sethusamudram Project. “Since at least the Seventies,” says Captain Balakrishnan, “India has worked on a two-fleet principle. Once a year or during VIP visits, the fleet join. Otherwise, they work perfectly independently, and no power can prevent them from coming together. Anyhow, Sethusamudram is not the answer. Naval ships never move alone, and they need wide seas to operate. In the channel, ships have to move in single file. The escort profile can never be maintained. V.Prabhakaran (of the Tamil Tigers) will salivate at the sight of the unescorted Indian Navy. There are the Sea Tigers to contend with in the area. And remember that not only has the LTTE air power, it has also shown skills in night flying. For the Navy, the channel only represents a source of trouble.” Since the channel draught is no more than ten metres, it rules out the aircraft carrier Viraat in full load, and the under-refurbishment Admiral Gorshkov cannot pass Sethusamudram at all. For Indian naval power projection in the Indian Ocean, a naval base in Rameshwaram would be an asset. But the SSCP could be a liability.
On the other hand, the Sethusamudram Project’s positive disadvantages are several. It could, for a start, draw India into the LTTE-Sri Lanka civil war. India has said no to joint patrolling with the Sri Lankan Navy in the area as this would bias it against the LTTE, whereas India wants to stay neutral. Even without any channel traffic, Indian fishermen are being fired upon both by the Sri Lankan Navy and the LTTE, each claiming that the fishermen are spying or working for the other party. Imagine when the channel opens, and in addition to securing such international shipping as passes through it, the fishermen also have to be protected by the Navy. Also, in the triangle pointing to the Gulf of Mannar and in the scalene triangle north of Palk Bay, currently no international ships go. But with the channel and ships coming, smuggling to the LTTE gains impetus. The Indian Navy would not care for the additional responsibility of boarding ships to search for LTTE weapons. And in case LTTE air power is deployed against ships using the channel, it would destroy India’s image and circumscribe its ambitions in the Indian Ocean.
4. SSCP hurts Indian fishermen worst
nature is working against the Sethusamudram project. In a lucid piece in the Economic and Political Weekly, Dr R.Ramesh of a Coimbatore organization called Doctors for Safer Environment highlights one critical aspect of the GoMPBPS area, which is that it is one of India¡¦s five major sedimentation sinks. While Indian and Sri Lankan rivers and long shore currents are the source of most of this sedimentation, the region becomes a sink perhaps on account of the Ramar Bridge which acts as a natural breaker for the ocean currents. Any SSCP study done on sedimentation is before the 26 December 2004 tsunami, and Dr Ramesh says that even these studies, one of them conducted by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) of Nagpur, address a small amount of the sedimentation. For example, the annual sediment load for the sink is 58.8000 x 106mƒV. This causes the area to become shallower by a centimetre every year. NEERI in its Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study for SSCP is able to account for only a fraction of this, for 0.2657 x 106m3, which is sediments contributed by long shore currents and tides in the Ramar Bridge or Adam¡¦s Bridge area. Subtracting for other studies which account for sedimentation, a colossal 99.4 per cent of the sediment load is unaccounted for in the waters where the Sethusamudram Channel is being dredged. Consequently, dredging and sedimentation are taking place side by side, and it is quite possible that nature will win out. Indeed, the sediment load in the GoMPBPS area would be much larger. The data published here is all pre-2004 tsunami.
From the SSCP angle, there is worse news in the Vedaranyam-Jaffna peninsular stretch of Palk Bay. According to a study by S.M.Ramaswamy et al in 1998, the rate of sediment building activity here is twenty-nine metres a year. They say that at this rate, Vedaranyam would be connected to Jaffna peninsula in another four hundred years. G.Victor Rajamanickem, a noted coastal geo-morphologist and mineralogist, says that between 1960 and 1986, the Palk Bay grew shallower by six metres. The SSCP is being dug coincidentally in areas where the sea bed is rising twenty-five to seventy-five times more than the average. Project authorities have so far shown no concern for these facts.
