By K.S. Jayaraman
Bangalore, Sep 25 (IANS) Prominent scientists from around the world have called for “urgent action” by the Indian government to prevent any further delay in the construction of the proposed underground physics laboratory in Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu.

The mega science project has been stalled for the past three years as the scientists have not received the mandatory clearance from the state forest department to go ahead with the construction.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, eleven physicists — including Nobel laureates Sheldon Glashow of the US and Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan — have urged his personal intervention so that the “important” project can move forward.

First proposed in 2001, the Rs.6.7 billion ($139.4 million) India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012. The scientists had planned to dig huge caverns inside a hill to house a 50,000 ton iron detector for studying the elementary particles known as neutrinos.

There are only half a dozen underground laboratories in the world trying to unravel the properties of these elusive, almost massless, particles which rarely interact with matter. The 1,300-metre rock cover over the INO will ensure all particles other than neutrinos will be filtered out.

“The detector prototype is ready and the first instalment of Rs.3.2 billion for the project has also been sanctioned by the Planning Commission,” INO spokesman Naba Mondal, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai told IANS. “But we cannot start construction of the lab. We applied for a permit in December 2006, and there has been no reply to date (from the forest department),” he added.

The proposed INO site at Singara, about 250 km south of Bangalore, is within the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR), a prime elephant and tiger habitat. NBR Alliance, a coalition of Indian organisations concerned about the reserve, fears that digging the two km long tunnel to set up the lab and the resulting truck traffic will cause a lot of disturbance to the region that is a vital corridor for the movement of tigers and elephants.

“The Alliance, in a resolution signed by over 25 eminent conservationists, says that “based on presently available data, the INO should not be allowed to come up in the Singara area of the Nilgiris”.

Mondal says the critics are exaggerating. “Singara’s selection out of all sites was based on safety, seismicity, as well as year-round accessibility.” The INO team has submitted a detailed plan to mitigate the disturbance during the construction phase to the forest department. “There will be negligible impact once the lab is up and running,” he says.

The world physics community agrees. “Having visited a number of underground facilities throughout the world, I do not think there are any real dangers to the wildlife in Mudumalai and its environs, only imagined ones,” says Maury Goodman, head of neutrino group at Argonne National Lab in the US.

“The INO facility would be a unique laboratory for the study of fundamental physics. It would be a shame if this could not be brought to a realisation,” he said.

The INO team that met Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh Sep 4 is hopeful that the issue will be resolved in favour of the selected site at Singara.

“The importance of INO in the context of international science cannot be overemphasised,” the Nobel laureates and others said in their letter to Manmohan Singh. “Other groups in other countries are waiting for the operation of, and results from, INO (but) they are not going to wait indefinitely.”

The letter further said that plans are already afoot both in the US and China for building huge underground neutrino labs. “Time is running out and the competitive edge that INO had is slipping away. Any further significant delay will be very detrimental to the success of the whole project, and may indeed make the project moot.”