Koodankulam: A Nuclear Plant In My Backyard 

I come from a village called Kavalkinaru in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, not far from Kanyakumari. My father was employed at a heavy water plant in Tuticorin, and I spent the first 22 years of my life in the Atomic Energy Township there. I was always told by the people in my township that nuclear energy was safe, and that it was the future. I believed them.

By 2001, construction of the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) had begun at a distance of about 18 kilometers from my village. Many people in the region did not care much about the power plant or the effect it would have on them, until 2011 when the Japanese tsunami, and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster, caused panic in the region.

Villagers, already severely affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, began raising a lot of questions about the safety of nuclear power. KNPP was just nearing its completion, and the people living in the vicinity of the plant started fearing a similar catastrophe at home.

I had my own concerns about the impact that a power plant might have on my native region. The Indian government had done little to allay villagers’ fears regarding safety of the plant in the event of a disaster — the official response has always been ambiguous, and completely lacking in transparency on plant preparedness. So I decided to visit Idinthakarai village, the nerve center of the anti-nuclear struggle.

During my visit to Idinthakarai, I witnessed the people’s opposition and understood its intensity. Most media in my state (Tamil Nadu) is highly politicized — the media agencies are owned or controlled by individuals with competing partisan interests. Most of the reports that emerge from the site of the protests has political agenda.

I decided to document this struggle independently, and without any political bias, by being with the people and their concerns, and recording the events there almost on a daily basis.

The people of Koodankulam have now been in non-violent protest for more than 1300 days. Throughout they have been repeatedly subjected to violence by government forces.

The protests have not only created a debate over nuclear energy in India, but also questioned the governing principles on which the world’s largest democracy was built. I tried to cover the non-violent protests, human rights violations, and issues related to the livelihood of the local community, and I continue to visit the village and go along with its people whenever there is an agitation or a campaign.