JOIN USKalam rolls out 10-point formula for Kudankulam
In a 39-page research report co-authored with his aide V Ponraj, after a visit and detailed review of the 2000 MW Russian-aided nuclear power plant on Sunday, Kalam urged rolling out a “long-term perspective plan” for the development of the Kudankulam area as a sine qua non for the project’s success.
According to the report, which Kalam has sent to the Central and Tamil Nadu Governments on Monday, while the panels of experts appointed by the Centre and State should in good faith thrash out all issues to dispel the local people’s “legitimate fears”, they should also strive for arriving at an “solution acceptable to the people” of that area in Tirunelveli district.
“Hence, my recommendation is that Kudankulam area urgently requires a perspective plan for development,” Kalam said in his report. The kernels of such an in-depth plan is to be found in his long-espoused concept of “PURA” (providing urban amenities in rural areas), said the former President, outlining one such “integrated special programme” with a Rs 200-crore budget for Kudankulam and its surrounding 50 to 60 villages.
There are ten strands to the “Special Plan” virtually commanded by Kalam, to give it a morally supervening status like the biblical god’s own “Ten Commandments.” They include better four-lane road connectivity between the villages and the main southern Tamil Nadu centres of Tirunelveli, Kanniyakumari and Madurai.
Setting up job-creating ancillary industrial units for youth beyond a 30-km radius from the KNPP plant, soft bank loan facilities to youth with a 25 per cent grant component, construction of “green houses” and other social infrastructure for the local people, a one million litre per day capacity sea water desalination plant, a 500-bed hospital built to world standards, a CBSE school, broadband connectivity to all villages in the Kudankulam area and setting up of a “disaster response and management centre” to reassure the people that nothing is found wanting on the safety aspects, are among his other key prescriptions.