# Kerala Says the Safety Checks the Court Ordered on Mullaperiyar Were Never Done. Tamil Nadu Wants the Level Raised Anyway > A budget announcement in Chennai has restarted the oldest argument between the two states. The Kerala minister's complaint is narrow and awkward: the inspections that would settle it have not happened. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/kerala-mullaperiyar-level-objection - Author: Vikram Shetty - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-08-06T11:45:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-06T11:45:00.000Z - Tags: Mullaperiyar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Dam Safety - Hindi edition: https://indiamax.net/hi/article/kerala-mullaperiyar-level-objection - Reported first by: The Hindu (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kerala-minister-says-sc-directions-on-mullaperiyar-dam-unimplemented-objects-to-any-water-level-hike-by-tn/article71312211.ece) --- Kerala's Water Resources Minister Mons Joseph said on Thursday that key Supreme Court directions on the safety of the Mullaperiyar dam remain uncomplied with, and that Kerala will go back to the court if Tamil Nadu proceeds with raising the reservoir's water level beyond 142 feet. He was speaking a day after the Tamil Nadu government used its Budget to announce that it would pursue exactly that. The dam is 131 years old and sits in Kerala's Idukki district while being operated by Tamil Nadu, which is the arrangement at the root of everything that follows. Joseph said Kerala's position is unchanged and that under no circumstances will it permit a level above 142 feet, describing this as a period of heightened concern about the structure's safety. The specific complaint is worth separating from the rhetoric, because it is narrow and checkable. Tamil Nadu has been asked to subject the dam to inspections, including those the Supreme Court specified, and according to Joseph none of them has been carried out. Kerala has separately asked the court that the National Dam Safety Authority conduct a comprehensive inspection itself. That was to have happened before 31 December, and he says not even a basic safety audit has been done. Directions on strengthening the baby dam also remain unimplemented. If that account is accurate, the sequence being proposed is backwards in a way that does not require anyone to take a side on the underlying dispute. The 142 foot figure is not a Kerala preference. It is the position the Supreme Court accepted, and as Joseph notes, neither state has the authority to change it on its own. A proposal to hold more water behind a structure whose court ordered safety verification has not been completed is a proposal to increase the load before establishing what the structure can carry. Whether the dam is in fact sound is precisely the question the uncompleted inspections were meant to answer. Joseph was blunt about the diplomacy, and unusually so for a minister discussing a neighbouring state. Asked whether earlier governments in the two states had managed the issue better, he said cordial relations had not produced anything, that no major decision was taken over the past ten years, and that the two sides remain where they were. Kerala's underlying demand has not changed either: a new dam at Mullaperiyar, built by agreement, giving Tamil Nadu the water it needs while removing the safety question for the people living downstream. That is the third interstate river dispute in this state in a fortnight, after Tamil Nadu's letter to the Prime Minister on Mekedatu and Karnataka's all party meeting on the Cauvery releases, and all three have the same shape. Each turns on a technical question that a body with the standing to settle it has not settled, so each defaults to the Supreme Court, which is not an engineering authority and can only order that the engineering be done. In the Cauvery row the missing piece is an agreed rule for sharing a shortfall. Here it is a completed safety audit. Neither is a political demand, and neither exists. There was also a smaller row about representation. Joseph defended the appointment of Ashutosh Das of Odisha as Kerala's member on the Mullaperiyar expert committee, rejecting criticism that the state's representative should be a Keralite. The rule Kerala is actually pressing for, he said, is that it be consulted before its own representative is named, as Tamil Nadu is for its nominee, after the Centre replaced Kerala's earlier nominee without asking. On the flooding in central Kerala he said preparedness had not fallen short, that waste blocking the Thottappally spillway in Alappuzha had been cleared enough to improve the discharge to sea, and that water levels were receding in Kottayam and Upper Kuttanad. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/kerala-mullaperiyar-level-objection.