KMSS warns NHPC about fate of Assam

By our Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, April 28: The Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) has warned NHPC afresh about the would be fate of Assam if the Northeast and the foot hills of the Himalaya are rocked by an earthquake of intensity equal to the one that rattled Nepal on April 25.

Talking to newsmen in Guwahati today, KMSS leader Akhil Gogoi said: "The Northeast has already been identified as an earthquake-prone zone. According to seismologist Bilham, there has not been much research on earthquake in Northeast and the foot hills of the Himalayas. We shouldn't forget that the earthquake with an intensity of 8.7 in the Richter scale in 1950 had killed over 3,000 people in Assam. And the April 25 earthquake that killed over 4,000 in Nepal is not the disastrous earthquake which the seismologists all over the world have been talking about. If that earthquake occurs in the Northeast and the foot hills of the Himalayas, what will happen to Assam? What will happen to the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project and 168 other dams?"

The KMSS leader is also critical of the move of the local dam experts who, he feels, have been taking the side of NHPC. "If they do that, the KMSS will do all to expose them before the posterity," Akhil Gogoi said.

The KMSS leader also said that Dispur and New Delhi fell short of doing all to bring back the people from Assam and elsewhere in the country who have been stranded in Nepal. "When there has been such a catastrophe, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi should have been back to the State from his foreign tour," he said, and added: "The family members of injured Abhijit Baruah of Jyotigar here said that he is not getting treatment there."