Pothundi is where you stop. Everyone stops — it is at the bottom of the ghat road, there is water and a view, and it makes a natural break before the hairpins. Almost nobody who stops there is told the one genuinely remarkable thing about it, which is what the dam is made of.
No cement
The core wall of the earth dam is built with a mixture of jaggery and quick lime. Not cement. Jaggery — unrefined cane sugar — mixed with lime produces a mortar that sets hard and is remarkably durable; the technique is old, well attested across South Asia, and long predates Portland cement. It is described as the second dam in Asia not built with a cement mixture.
That is not a folk curiosity bolted onto a modern structure. It is the structural heart of the thing: the core wall is the impermeable spine inside an earth embankment, the element that stops water finding a path through the fill. Building it out of sugar and lime is a real engineering decision, made when the alternative was not available, and it has held.
Pothundi, as recorded
| Type | Earth dam with a jaggery-and-quick-lime core wall |
| Height | 32.61 m |
| Length | 1,680 m |
| Rivers dammed | Meenichiladipuzha and Padipuzha, tributaries of the Aylampuzha |
| Built | 19th century — “considered one of the oldest dams in India” (the sources hedge, and so do we) |
| Later works | Developed as a medium irrigation project, completed 1971 |
| Irrigates | About 5,470 ha in Palakkad district |
| Also supplies | Drinking water for Nemmara, Ayalur and Melarcode panchayats |
Read the hedge, because it is doing work
The phrase in the sources is that Pothundi “is considered one of the oldest dams in India”. Considered, and one of. Not “is the oldest”, which is how it usually gets repeated. We keep the hedge because nobody has given a construction year, only a century, and “one of the oldest” with no date attached is a claim about reputation rather than about records.
The 1971 date is separate and is firm, and it explains the shape of the place today. What you are looking at is a nineteenth-century structure that was taken over and developed into a modern medium irrigation project a century later. Both things are true at once, which is why the dam feels older than the reservoir infrastructure around it.
- This is a working irrigation head-works and a drinking-water source for three panchayats, not a viewpoint that happens to have a dam.
- It is the gateway to Nelliyampathy — the ghat road begins beyond it, and there is a forest check post on the climb.
- The interesting part is invisible. You cannot see the core wall; you can only know it is there.
- Give it more than the ten minutes it usually gets. It is the older, stranger structure of the two on this road.
Why sugar
Because it works. Lime mortars gain strength slowly and can be brittle; organic additives — jaggery among them, and elsewhere egg white, plant gums and fermented liquids — change how the mix behaves, slowing the set, improving workability and producing a denser, tougher result. Builders across South Asia knew this empirically for centuries before anyone could explain the chemistry. Pothundi is one of the places where you can point at the outcome.
There is a neat contrast a little way north. At Malampuzha, the same district holds a mid-twentieth-century masonry dam built with the full apparatus of the First Five Year Plan — engineers, budgets, a commissioning ceremony in 1955. Palakkad district therefore has, an hour apart, a dam built by the modern Indian state and a dam whose core is sugar and lime. Neither is a museum piece. Both are still irrigating.