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        'My conscience hath a thousand several tongues. And every tongue brings in a several tale. And every tale condemns you for a villain.'

        No one can dispute the fact that the Sethusamudram Canal Project (SSCP) has been planned, organised and launched as a Political Asset for a few Cabinet Ministers in the UPA government and some of their counterparts in Tamilnadu. According to expert, unbiased technical and scientific opinion in India and abroad, SSCP is a scientifically inconsistent, technologically non-feasible project at the present time. The cogent arguments presented by some Tsunami specialists and Earth scientists of international stature have not been considered or answered in open-transparent forums by the leading proponents of the project. Many of the vital questions raised by Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in March 2005, were bypassed in a subterranean manner by imaginative, covert, sly and stealthy manoeuvres and operations. What is amazing is that the top brass of the Indian Navy has remained silent or neutral on the SSCP and the brazen promoters of the SSCP - mean the firmly entrenched vested interests involved only in a private loot under the garb of public interest - have become the Naval Strategists of Palk Bay!.

        Sethusamudram Shipping Canal in its present form is scientifically inconsistent and technically indefensible for the following reasons:

        1) According to Dr Ramesh, NEERI Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the study that gives the SSCP, its scientific legitimacy, has ignored the studies available on the sedimentation pattern of Palk Bay completely and has not fixed the exact locations wherein the dredged material would be dumped - these studies are crucial for the economic and technical survival of project, as they will give us an idea of how much sediment should be dredged each season and also prepare us for a study that will tell us where the dumped sediments will move every season.

        2) Subsurface geology has been studied only for the 20 kilo meter stretch of the canal in the Adam's Bridge area. Nothing is known about the subsurface geology of the Palk Strait region. Considering the fact that the canal's length will be 54.2 km; if the sub surface turns out to be rocky, the cost of the project will go up many folds, and the effect of blasting these rocks would cause serious damages to the Palk Bay environment. This was clearly stated in the Technical Feasibility Report prepared by NEERI only to be politically ignored at the time of political sanction of SSCP.

        3) The historical cyclone data for this region from the years 1860 to 2000 clearly indicate that cyclones cross this region and its neighbourhood once in every four years. Historically we have enough data to show that all these cyclones have caused severe erosion of the coastal stretch in the nearby areas from time to time by dumping the eroded material in Palk Bay and Adam's Bridge area. NEERI's EIA has not taken note of this natural phenomenon at all.

        4) Indomer's 'Hydrodynamic Modelling Study for SSCP' has also ignored the issue of the impact of cyclones on the canal completely. Thus, we do not know, what will happen to the canal in scientific terms during the period of cyclones.

        5) Tsunami computer simulation models by Professor Steven N Ward of University of California, Professor Aditya Riyadi of Pusat Penelitian Kelautan Insitut Teknologi, Bandung, Indonesia, WI-Delft Hydraulics, Netherlands and DHI Softwares, USA and Indomer-Alkyon have described graphically the way tsunami waves attacked Palk Bay on 26 December, 2004. It is against all this background that the International Tsunami Expert Professor Tad S Murty chose to warn the Prime Minister's Office on 30 January, 2005 about the possible negative and dangerous impact of SSCP during the times of future tsunamis. The PMO instead of referring the matter to the NEERI who were the official consultants of the Government of India, chose to refer the matter directly to the Office of the Chairman of Tuticorin Port Trust. He gave his final reply to the 14 vital points raised by the PMO on 8 March 2005 only on 30 June 2005. Then in a kind of sudden swoop operation the de jure Prime Minister and the de facto Prime Minister of Italian vintage air dashed to Madurai on 2 July 2005, to lay a solid foundation for the destruction of coastal life in Southern Tamilnadu.

        The NEERI had undertaken their EIA of SSCP long before Tsunami hit parts of Tamilnadu and Kerala in December 2004. A preliminary tsunami impact assessment report prepared by the Zoological Survey of India for the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in early 2005 clearly concluded that the tsunami that hit the Tamilnadu and Andaman and Nicobar coasts in 2004 had irrevocably altered the marine ecology of the Bay of Bengal region. No public authority connected with SSCP has taken note of this report.

        When the SSCP was about to be launched in July 2005, Dr C P Rajendran of the Centre for Earth Science Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, a Paleo-Seismologist and one of India's top geologists gave a timely warning to the effect that the SSCP should be put on hold. Giving detailed technical reasons, he concluded: 'Sethusamudram, as the name suggests, is the part of an ocean that is being constantly bridged by natural sedimentation processes, and the nature has been at this work for hundreds of thousands of years. By implementing this project, we are disturbing these processes. The project lacks technical, scientific and economic credibility, and is another disaster in the making. All the objections raised by me will remain valid until these issues are resolved by an independent group of experts'.

        Professor G Victor Rajamanickam is one of India's eminent coastal geo-morphologists and mineralogists. And he is an authority on the Tamilnadu's coastal geomorphology.

        In August 2005, Professor Rajamanickam when asked about the environmental impact of Tsunami of December 2004, replied as follows: 'The Tsunami had completely disturbed the Shelf sediment right from river Krishna down to Kanyakumari. It had disturbed the seabed even up to 200 meters. ...So, the shelf sediments now have a completely new texture after the Tsunami. If one studies the present sediments, one would be surprised to find the seabed to be a different one now. It is in this regard I feel that we have to undertake a resurvey of our seabed and understand the nature of the sediment present in it. Hence I feel an understanding of the pre-Tsunami sedimentation condition alone cannot work possibly for any modelling'.

        Further, the Monitoring Committee set up by the Ministry of Shipping, Government of India to assess the impact of the dredging activity on the environment and advise the project authorities included only marine biologists and microbiologists besides experts from the fields of fisheries, agriculture. It is shocking to note that it had not considered including sedimentologists, geo-morphologists or meteorologists, hydrographers, geologists, coastal tectonics experts, or experts from atmospheric sciences in the Committee. The present monitoring team, of scientists from Marine Biology, Fisheries etc., will be able to do only 10 per cent of the total required monitoring work and the remaining 90 per cent has to be done by earth scientists. The lack of Earth System scientists in the Committee will definitely bring problems to the maintenance of Palk Strait in the future.

        Professor Tad S Murty has categorically affirmed that Chairman, Tuticorin Port Trust (TPT) sent him a fax dated early February 2005 stating that the SSCP had been finalised by the end of February 2005 (!!) and they wanted Professor Murty's comments within 24 hours!!. Murty sent a short reply explaining why the Eastern entrance of the proposed channel in the SSCP should be realigned and reoriented. Murty has stated that he received a reply from Chairman, TPT saying that his experts outright dismissed his idea as ridiculous because it had absolutely no merit. Murty's comments are very relevant in this context: 'I do not worry that TPT does not think much of my ideas or me. I do not have to justify myself to TPT. I have to fight my battles, not with TPT but in the field of peer reviewed international scientific journals'.

        Against this background it should be clear that there has been an organised conspiracy of firmly entrenched vested interests - the PMO, the Union Ministry of Shipping and Transport and the TPT- to ignore the best technical advice given by International experts about the wholly avoidable dangers and disasters of the SSCP in its present shape. The beautiful words of the great American Judge Justice Cardozo are very relevant in this context: 'Means unlawful in their inception do not become lawful by relation when suspicion ripens into discovery'.

        There is no table of weights and measures for ascertaining or determining what constitutes the Due process. What is due process of law depends upon circumstances. It varies with the subject matter and necessities of the situation. Due process of law requires that the proceedings shall be fair, but fairness is a relative, not an absolute concept. It is fairness with reference with particular conditions or particular results. Whichever way one looks at it, there has been a total violation of the DUE PROCESS by the Government of India in according sanction for the SSCP. That is why I am appealing to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India to treat this newspaper article as a Public Interest Litigation and to stay the construction work till all the public issues are fully thrashed out openly in the highest judicial tribunal of the land.

        (The writer, who is a retired IAS office, was the first chairman of Tuticorin Port Trust. He was the one who completed the work on coal jetty, oil jetty and other facilities in connection with the commissioning of Tuticorin Harbour Project. He became its chief on 1 April, 1979.)