Candlelight vigils mark one month of Japan quake (Lead)
April 11th, 2011 - 9:56 pm ICT by IANSMumbai/New Delhi, April 11 (IANS) Over a hundred people Monday took part in a silent candlelight vigil in Mumbai and Pune to pay homage to the victims of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the island-nation a month ago.
On the occasion, the activists also voiced their protest against the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project and nuclear energy in general, an organiser said.
Similar candlelight vigils were held in other Indian cities, including Bangalore, Hyderabad, Goa, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Cochin, Chennai, said an official from Greenpeace India, which organised the event.
“With six untested foreign reactors of 1,600 MW capacity supplied by the French company Areva and built on a site which is earthquake prone, the Jaitapur project is a recipe for disaster,” Karuna Raina, a Greenpeace India campaigner, said.
Referring to Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao’s trip to Japan, Raina said the government is going ahead with discussions on signing a nuclear deal with Japan at the foreign secretary level even after a nuclear tragedy of such scale there.
“Instead, the government should phase out nuclear energy and create political and economic space to invest heavily in energy efficiency and harness clean, safe renewable energies for our future,” Raina urged.
A volunteer, Sneha Rawlani, who helped organise the vigil in Mumbai, said: “I live in Mumbai and I am afraid of the risk (over the Jaitapur plant). After seeing what happened in Japan and learning about Chernobyl, I don’t think the government should use such risky technology to generate electricity.”
In New Delhi, the Greenpeace organised a candlelight vigil at india Gate lawns Monday evening and protested nuclearisation of India.
“India has ambitious plans to import 21 foreign reactors. Some of these are untested technology and some of them will be built on a site which is prone to earthquakes. The authority is hell bent on not learning from the recent events,” said a Greenpeace official.
The earthquake and the tsunami that followed it March 11 in Japan left over 13,000 people dead. At least 14,377 people were still unaccounted for.
Japan was rattled by another quake of magnitude 7 Monday.
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