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EVEN AS the seers across the country protest the Sethusamudram project asking the Centre to abandon it saying it was part of the country’s heritage, a researcher in Dr Hari Singh Gaur University here strongly feels it will destroy the bio-diversity.

Professor P K Kathal of Centre of Advance Studies in Geology in the Sagar University, who has done research on the project, claims that it is also important to learn about the present ecological situation of the area, which is the second richest marine biodiversity on the earth.

Kathal’s research was published in the science journal ‘Current Sciences’ in the October edition in 2005. The Rs 2400 crore Setusamudram Ship Canal Project (SSCP) between Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar will connect Sri Lanka and India through Adams Bridge.

He says this 360 km project is first of its kind in the world and was mooted in 1860 by a British engineer. Kathal says, the ministry of environment and forest says that the region supports 3,800 different species of animals and plant.

The continuous navigation in this region will offset and trigger devastating ecological imbalance, affecting the lives of million of fishermen and many endangered organisms like fishes, coral reefs, sea horses, algae and other marine plants. 

He said the national environmental engineering research institute (NEERI) Nagpur approved the project after a rapid ‘environmental impact assessment’.

He says “if adequate measures are not taken in time environmental pollution may trigger irreparable ecological imbalance in the region”.  He further said that while dredging the turbidity will cause irrecoverable and irreversible environmental loss to the ecosystem. Approximately 98 million cubic meter soil will be displaced and it is sufficient to keep the water murky for 4 years or more, he claimed.

This will cause imbalance in oxygen and carbondioxide affecting phytoplankton-the first member of marine life and destroy the coral reefs-better known as ‘the lungs of the shallow oceans’.