A plea was filed in the Delhi High Court against the department of atomic energy (DAE) and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) for not sharing details related to Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project in Tamil Nadu under the transparency law, a petitioner said Saturday.
The plea was filed Friday for allegedly not abiding with an order of the Central Information Commission to share the site evaluation report (SER) and the safety analysis report (SAR) relating to the Kudankulam project, said the petitioner.
“The CIC had ordered NPCIL to share the SER and SAR by May 25. But till date the SAR has not been shared. The NPCIL gave me some sheets of paper said to be executive summary of SER. Hence this petition,” S.P. Udayakumar, petitioner and coordinator of People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), told IANS by phone from Idinthakarai in Tirunelveli district.
In April this year, the CIC ordered the NPCIL to release the SER and SAR by May 25 and upload both the reports on its website.
According to Udayakumar, both the reports did not relate to either national security or anything protected under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
The reports related to geography, environment, meteorology and geology and have a huge bearing on public health and safety, he said.
While the NPCIL shared the SER with Udayakumar, it appealed to the CIC to modify its April 30 order on the grounds that it was holding the SAR in a fiduciary capacity for the Russian equipment supplier and also that due notification procedure was not followed.
The NPCIL is building the power project at Kudankulam in Tirunelveli district, around 650 km from here, with Russia supplying the entire equipment for the reactors and other related systems.
The Madras High Court is also expected to pronounce its decision on a batch of cases against the project.
The government Wednesday told parliament that the first unit of the project was scheduled to be operational by October. The two 1,000 MW units of the project were initially scheduled to be completed in December 2008.
