The battle of Waggamon is launched
Kerala State government officials are pushing hard an eco-tourism project in the Waggamon area of Idukki district with the tacit support of their political masters. Eco-tourism may be a new word, but the concept is not new to this region. One of the earliest attempts in India to attract tourists to the forests was taken up by the erstwhile Travancore government when it set up the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. It made arrangements for the visitors to watch from close quarters herds of wild elephants as they came to a lake to drink water and bathe. Over the past 50 years much of the evergreen forests have been denuded by encroachers and tree-fellers enjoying political patronage. Consequently environmentalists view any project in the forest area with a good deal of suspicion.
A decade ago the Kerala government launched with fanfare the Agastyavanam Biological Park project in the southern foothills of the Western Ghats. It, too, was advertised as an eco-tourism project. Fifty-six tribal families who were threatened with eviction from their traditional homeland took up cudgels against the project, supported by human rights groups. The high court ordered stoppage of work when a petitioner produced evidence to show that the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests had not approved the project. The law, as it now stands, forbids the State from using any forest area for non-forest purposes without the Centre’s permission. Courts have ruled that tourism is a non-forest purpose.
An eco-tourism project at Waggamon was on offer at the Global Investors Meet held at Kochi last January but it had no takers. However, it appears some private entrepreneurs have been operating in the area clandestinely for some time now. They have been engaged in laying roads and building resorts. Opposition leader V. S. Achuthanandan, after a visit to the area, stated in the State Assembly that about 12,500 hectares of land had been encroached upon there. He alleged that some MPs and MLAs were involved in the racket. He drew a sharp parallel between the Waggamon developments and the recent massive encroachments in the Mathikettan areas with official and political connivance. The high court had stepped in and ordered the eviction of all encroachers from Mathikettan. According to Achuthanandan, rivalry among the Forest, Revenue and Tourism departments is proving beneficial to the encroachers.
Skirting the issue of encroachment, Tourism Minister K. V. Thomas said the tourism project in the area was initiated by the previous Left Democratic Front government. The Revenue department had transferred about 745 hectares of land to the Tourism department for the project. A master plan for eco-tourism was ready. Another master plan for the overall development of Waggamon was being prepared with the help of the Centre and a firm of consultants. Forest Minister K. Sudhakaran said he had asked his department to ascertain if there had been any encroachments into the forests, and he expected to receive a report within days.
The responses of the Tourism and Forest Ministers threw little light on the private sector activity at Waggamon. The Revenue Minister did not respond to the Opposition leader’s charges at all. He was the one at whom fingers were pointed in connection with the Mathikettan encroachments.
Eco-tourism projects require careful handling. Experience the world over shows that they often result in damage to the environment. Scientific evaluations have shown that several schemes evolved to protect and preserve biodiversity have in fact had the opposite effect. The most objectionable aspect of the State government’s eco-tourism projects is that they have been formulated by bureaucrats and politicians without seeking the views of environmental scientists. While it is necessary to involve the private sector in tourism projects, it needs to be borne in mind that the prime motivation of the entrepreneurs is profit and they may not be sufficiently sensitive to the need to protect the environment.
The authorities ought to draw a lesson from the experience of the Agastyavanam Biological Park project. Work on the project was launched without waiting for the necessary clearances. By the time the judiciary steeped in and ordered stoppage of work on that ground, the Forest department, the sponsors of the project, had already laid a road through the reserve forest and built more than 50 concrete structures well within the forest to serve as staff quarters. Once road is laid it is not easy to stop unauthorized felling and transport of trees.
The death of a river
It is now official. The death of one of Kerala’s rivers has been formally acknowledged by the authorities.
The State Assembly’s committee on environment said in a report that the Varattar is “practically dead”. It attributed the river’s demise to havoc wrought by man.
The Varattar is -- rather, it was -- a tributary of the Pampa, one of the major rivers of the State. Additionally, it enjoys the status of a holy river in view of its association with the hill shrine of Sabarimala, which attracts a large number of pilgrims from all the southern States. Customarily, the pilgrims take a dip in the Pampa on the way to the shrine.
Blessed with a dozen kayals (large lakes) and 40-odd rivers, Kerala always prided in being a water-rich State. All its rivers are short. Most of them originate in the Sahya ranges on the eastern border and flow westward to the Arabian Sea, which at the broadest point is only 100 kilometers away as the crow flies. The most important of the rivers are the Bharatapuzha and the Periyar, both of which have a special place in the affections of the people as their banks are dotted with towns and villages that have played a part in their cultural history.
The rivers get plentiful supply of water from the two monsoons that lash the State annually. In the good old days the evergreen rainforests helped to retain the rainwater. Thanks to the thick foliage, the rainwater would hit the ground slowly and get absorbed by the soil, swelling the groundwater. As a result of extensive denudation, the forests lost the capacity to hold water. The rainwater now hits the ground directly and flows into the sea quickly. Consequently the groundwater level is going down steadily and the rivers are drying up.
Sand mining is also contributing to the death of rivers. The State has been experiencing a construction boom for several decades. The sand required for construction purposes comes mainly from the dry river beds. Trucks driving away from river beds laden with sand is a common sight. Some contractors remove sand on the strength of permits issued by the authorities while others operate clandestinely. Whether authorized or unauthorized, mining is almost invariably done unscientifically and the rivers gradually turn into seasonal streams and eventually become pools.
The Assembly committee’s report on the death of the Varattar is instructive. It says: “Encroachments and sand mining have turned the 15-km-long Varattar into a narrow sand bank, hemmed in by farmsteads and disease-spreading cesspools. All that is now left is a sad remnant of what was once a source of natural irrigation and water transport in the central Travancore region.”
It cited old revenue records which showed that the first six-kilometre stretch of the river from Arattupuzha near Chengannur was once 120 to 200 metres wide and the second stretch of nine kilometres was 60 metres wide. The width gradually shrank to 10 metres.
As if the mortal blows inflicted by its own people are not enough, Kerala’s rivers now face threats from outside too. It shares a part of its river waters with neighbouring Tamil Nadu under an agreement concluded between the erstwhile Travancore state and the British Indian province of Madras a century ago and renewed from time to time. Recently there have been allegations that Tamil Nadu is tapping water in excess of the agreed quantities. It is also said to be building dams to divert some Kerala rivers to its territory.
The Central government’s scheme for interlinking of rivers too may spell disaster for the State. The scheme has been talked about for decades but there has been no proper scientific studies to establish its feasibility. Environmentalists have been warning that the project, which involves interference with the natural flow of rivers, can have disastrous consequences. To their consternation, the Supreme Court recently asked the Centre to go ahead with the project.
Amidst these dismal developments, there is one piece of good news. The State government has drawn up a scheme to clean up 10 rivers, including the Bharatapuzha and the Pampa. It has also plans to enact a law to preserve rivers as natural resources.<o:p></o:p>
