Why a flower garden in Munnar belongs to the electricity board: Blossom Hydel Park and the 1944 weir

The name puzzles people, and it should. Blossom Hydel Park is a flower garden — lawns, a fountain, tiers of potted blooms, a play area, a cafe — and the middle word of its name belongs to a power station. The explanation is not decorative. The park stands on land owned by the Kerala State Electricity Board, immediately above a working diversion weir, and the society that takes your money at the gate is the board’s own.

Kerala’s first power station is 3.3 km down the road

Pallivasal, at Chithirapuram, was the first hydroelectric station in Kerala. Its first machine came on in March 1940 — a five-megawatt Pelton set from Escher Wyss of Switzerland — with a second in February 1941 and a third in February 1942. A later phase added three seven-and-a-half-megawatt Boving sets, bringing the station to 37.5 MW and roughly 284 million units a year. It is still generating. From the park gate it is 3.3 km by road, about five minutes.

The weir at the bottom of the garden

A power house needs water delivered to it, and in 1944 Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, the Diwan of Travancore who had inaugurated Pallivasal four years earlier, had a masonry headworks built across the Muthirapuzha to divert the river towards it. The structure carries his initials — the R. A. Headworks — and it is the low weir with the red-painted gate towers about 130 metres past the bottom of the park. That weir is why the water beside the flower walk is wide, green and almost still instead of a shallow hill river running over rock.

The Pallivasal scheme’s second phase went on to add the storage the headworks needed upstream: the Kundala dam, reckoned Asia’s first arch dam, and the Mattupetty dam. Every lake day-trippers take a pedal boat on above Munnar is part of the same plumbing that ends here.

From plumbing to tourism

The electricity board began putting its own dams and diversion works to tourist use in 2000 and now runs more than ten hydel tourism centres across Kerala — Mattupetty, Kundala, Echo Point, Anayirankal, Idukki, Banasura Sagar, Kakkayam and the rest. Blossom is the flat, riverside, family one. Ticketing for all of them moved onto a single booking site, and the operating society is registered out of Vydyuthi Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram.

One honest gap: no source we could find, in English or in Malayalam, gives the year Blossom itself opened. The board’s 2000 date is for its entry into tourism as a whole, not for this park, and we are not going to turn one into the other.