Silence broken, again
it is not all quiet in the Silent Valley. Still resounding with the echoes of India's first environment movement, this precious tract of rainforests in Kerala's Kundali hills of Western Ghats, is threatened once more. As the Kerala government plans to revive a hydroelectric project in the valley, which was shelved in 1981, environmentalists across the country are in a tizzy.
"The project is being revived because of the rising cost of power generation in the state,' claimed Kadavoor Sivadasan, the state's electricity minister. Justifying the move, R Balakrishna Pillai, former electricity minister of the state said that at the time of shelving the project, the then Union government had promised to reconsider it 20 years later. "Hence it is time to do so.' The state government has asked the Kerala State Electricity Board to formulate a proposal for the Union government which would incorporate technologies such as subsurface dams and