Jaya promises new Cauvery panel

Chief Minister and AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa laid the groundwork for the battle for the Tamil Nadu Assembly when she said it would be the last election the DMK would be fighting.

"It is a fight between the AIADMK and the DMK this time. The others are not important," she said, dismissing the smaller parties that are part of the DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance and that hold the key in the forthcoming Assembly elections.

Releasing the AIADMK election manifestos for Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Kerala, she said, "We will seek votes from the masses based on the good governance by our government for the past five years in the state".

Possibly recognising that those in her party who had been denied nominations this time could cause sabotage, Jayalalithaa virtually apologised to her colleagues. "Your time will come," she said, a sentiment not likely to console those who have been denied the ticket this time.

The party's manifesto for Tamil Nadu has 114 pages and addresses 38 issues. The AIADMK has promised to remove the special education cess and has said it will set up computer labs in every school, has promised in every district world class engineering colleges on a par with the IITs and a sports academy to help encourage talented sportspersons.

It also promised to end the artificial scarcity of essential commodities, like LPG, "created by wrong and anti-people policies of the Centre".

Coming down heavily on the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition at the Centre, the manifesto said scams had become the order of the day, indicating that the AIADMK had no intention of aligning with the UPA even at the Centre.

The party would fight for the setting up of a Cauvery Delta Authority in place of the present "politically-oriented and powerless" Cauvery River Authority (CRA) to enforce the final award of the tribunal. The draft plan for such an authority had already been submitted to the tribunal, which was expected to give its final award shortly, it said.

The manifesto reiterated Jayalalithaa's view that the Cauvery River Authority, with Prime Minister as the chairman and chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Pondicherry as members, was unable to meet in distress situations and take timely decisions.

The Jayalalithaa government, therefore, has proposed before the tribunal that it should in its final order recommend the setting up of a Cauvery Delta Authority, comprising experts and armed with powers to enforce its order. The new Authority should be headed by a retired Supreme Court judge or a High Court Chief Justice and should have under it a "Cauvery River Master" with a chief engineer and three independent experts as members.

On the dispute with Kerala over raising the height of the Mullaperiyar dam, the manifesto said Jayalalithaa had already announced that her government would move the Supreme Court to enforce its order to raise the height to 142 ft from the present 136 ft and to quash the recently passed Kerala legislation aimed at nullifying the order.

Among the achievements of the AIADMK rule, it listed the elimination of forest brigand Veerappan, bringing of Veeranam water to Chennai to meet its drinking water shortage, supply of bicycles and free text-books to school children and farmers production scheme.