Kerala is in the grip of a severe drought, unprecedented at least in the past two decades. For anyone who has visited it or seen its images in tourism brochures or TV promos, this would be difficult to believe. It is still God’s Own Country with seemingly rich forests, sprawling backwaters, sapphire lakes and the 44 rivers running across its 600-km-long territory. Yet, all the 14 districts in the State have been declared drought-hit, and four of them were declared so in December itself when the northeastern monsoon was yet to recede formally.
The drought is so intense that the Kerala Water Authority, the State-run drinking water distribution agency, is preparing to stop the pumping and distribution of drinking water in five districts, thus forcing almost eight million people to find the fluid of life all by themselves if they want to survive this summer. It is just a matter of time before the remaining districts are thrown into the same fate.
The State is going through an acute power shortage as water levels in hydel reservoirs have dipped to abysmally low levels. The groundwater table has gone down by a minimum of five metres throughout the State in five years. The opening line of TS Eliot’s Waste Land, “April is the cruelest month”, is absolutely true in Kerala’s case.
The inescapable fact is that it is a man-made crisis. Everybody — the politician, common man, traditional farmer, construction mafia, bore-well digger and the development monger — agrees on this. But the moment you say it aloud, you are branded as an environmental terrorist. That is why reputed environmentalist Madhav Gadgil, who put forward some ideas to save this tropical heaven, bio-diversity expert VS Vijayan and so many other Green men and women have become the enemies of the Establishment which would raze verdant forests and fill wet paddy lands to construct airports and kill tigers unscrupulously in the name of efforts to conserve mankind. Climate change in Kerala is no more a possibility, but it is a terribly tangible reality.
The hills of Wayanad, which were pleasurably cool even at summer mid-noons till some years ago, are now unbearably hot, thanks to the indiscriminate felling of bamboo clusters that spread for several kilometres, thus opening an inward corridor of heat through the border with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu into Kerala. Deforestation among the mighty hills on the border has led to extension of the rain-shadow zone of south-west Tamil Nadu into regions of Palakkad district, famous as Kerala’s Rice Chest and known for the largest mango-production centre in the country. Punalur in southern Kollam district, which saw the highest number of sunstroke incidents this summer, is already wearing the look of a desert owing to the rampant deforestation on the eastern side bordering rain-shadow Tamil Nadu areas. And the pity is that all this is happening because of the environmental degradation to which the mighty Western Ghats, from where Kerala derives all its natural richness, is being subjected to by rapacious elements in the cash-crops, sand-mining, quarrying, tourism and real estate sectors.
It could be an inevitable irony of the modern federal, democratic nation structure that an exclusively Kerala issue of how to protect its part of the Western Ghats should be decided almost 3,000 kilometres away in New Delhi, where Ministers and bureaucrats sitting in the cozy interiors of concrete buildings need not know anything about the Neerchals (natural water ducts), Adikkadus (undergrowth) and Poovals (seasons for cultivation as per soil moisture). Therefore, the battle to save the Western Ghats is now being fought at the Paryavaran Bhavan in New Delhi, with Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jayanthi Natarajan acting as the referee. “It is a battle, but is an unequal battle”, says Prakasan, a Thrissur-based environmentalist who has been (unsuccessfully) campaigning against illegal quarrying and sand-mining for the past 15 years.
“It is an unequal battle because we know which side gets the support of the Government authorities. We have seen this happening always”, he says.
The Gadgil panel, which had biodiversity expert Vijayan, who was chairman of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board which had thrown a spanner in the Kerala State Electricity Board’s plan to build a hydel project over the Athirapally Waterfalls in Thrissur district, and other eminent ecologists on it, had submitted its report in November 2011, with some harsh recommendations to save the Western Ghats instantly infuriating cash crop farmers of Idukki, Wayanad, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta districts and therefore the politicians in the Left and Congress-led camps and those who stood for developments. Gadgil wanted the entire Western Ghats to be declared as an ecologically sensitive zone, and called for stoppage of all kinds of eco-degradation activities, which included construction of dams, roads and resorts, blocking of waterways.
In the forefront of the protests against the Gadgil report, over which even bandhs were observed in Idukki and other districts, was the Catholic Church which wields immense influence over the present Congress-led Government in which Church-backed cash-crop farmers’ party, Kerala Congress (M), is a major partner. The high ranges of Kerala witnessed agitations on a daily basis, which were similar to or even more intense than the protests seen during the Kerala-Tamil Nadu stand-off over the Mullaperiyar dam issue. “There were even allegations that Madhav Gadgil and his team were pawns in the hands of international eco-extremists trying to undermine India’s development by forcing closure of cash crop farms and de-commissioning of dams”, complains environmentalist Girija S.
The second committee, headed by K Kasturirangan, who has never been known for his environmental expertise, and which had no biodiversity expert on it, was constituted to review the Gadgil recommendations on the Western Ghats. Environmentalists allege that the motive of the constitution of this committee is obvious from the very fact that it could settle all disputes over such a huge issue within a matter of months.
The new panel’s mission was indeed to strike a compromise, though the cost of it would be the continued destruction of the Western Ghats. That is why Mr Kasturirangan limited the eco-sensitive region of the mountain ranges to just 37 per cent and pronounced that the Athirapally project could be pursued if the economic advantages it could bring, could justify the environmental degradation caused by it. Meanwhile, God’s Own Country remains parched and is crying for water.
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