Blog Post Year: 2019

This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here. 

Are the changing patterns of habitations in Kerala merely a personal impression? Is the changing biodiversity and the sprawl of homes in my ancestral village, Mankurussi, a one off phenomenon? Not so; indeed they are corroborated by data contained in official reports of the state.

In 2016, as a prelude to the preparation of the state’s 13th Five Year Plan, the Kerala State Planning Board constituted a Working Group on Urban Issues. The Working Group comprised experts with rich experience on town planning, to housing, environment, energy, and participatory democracy and inclusion, and I had the privilege of co-chairing it. The opening paragraphs of the report contain insightful information on Kerala’s urbanisation, provided by a very competent Director of the Union Urban Development Ministry.

The report observes that Kerala’s settlement pattern is unique; comprising for the most part a continuous spread of habitation and increasing urbanisation. The share of urban population in total population started increasing from the 1980s (18.7% in 1981 to 26.4% in 1991) and surpassed the country’s average by 1991 (25.7%).  After a slowdown during 1991-2001, the percentage of urban population in the state grew rapidly during 2001-2011 (from 25.96% in 2001 to 47.72% in 2011).  Kerala is now the third most urbanised state in the country after Goa and Tamil Nadu and is reckoned by the 2011 census to be the fastest urbanising State in the country.

The report notes that Census 2011 witnessed a steep increase in the number of Census towns, over the 2001 Census. This feature is near universal; only two districts, Wayanad and Idukki have no Census towns in 2011. That is an interesting bit of information, because both Wayanad and Idukki were severely affected by the recent floods. Over 50% of the Census towns are in Kannur, Thrissur and Ernakulam districts. The number of urban agglomerations progressively rose from 9 in 1981 to 19 in 2011, of which five were newly listed in Census 2011. The 19 urban agglomerations account for 91% of Kerala’s towns and 93.74% of the urban population.

Yet, Kerala’s much lauded models of democratic decentralisation may be increasingly out of step with this rapid urbanisation. Many urban areas in Kerala, particularly the areas of continuous habitation alongside most arterial roads in the state, are still Gram Panchayats in their legal status (Table 2). This is evidenced in the difference between the number of statutory towns, namely, urban areas formally declared as urban by law and therefore served by Municipalities, and Census towns, which are still governed by Panchayats but are classified as urban areas from a Census viewpoint, based upon the population, population density and working force engaged in non-agricultural activities.

The report notes that urbanisation has not been accompanied by a formal reconfiguring of Gram Panchayats into Municipalities, or City Corporations. While on the one hand urbanised structures offer greater opportunities for economies of scale due to agglomeration, the Panchayat system offers greater opportunity for public participation as compared to the Constitutional design for urban areas. Thus, the change of status of Panchayats to Municipalities has the potential to rob citizens of platforms of participation, without replacing them with an equally potent constitutionally mandated equivalent.

The report also makes some prophetic remarks that are best reproduced in full. The report says:

“Like the rest of the world, Kerala’s cities and settlements face unprecedented threats from unsustainable consumption and production patterns, loss of biodiversity, pressure on ecosystems, pollution and increased vulnerability to natural and man-made disasters and climate change and its related risks. Kerala’s natural environment and biodiversity has been under severe stress, largely due to urbanisation. Wetlands, coastal areas, forests and hill regions have been particularly affected and these are all sensitive and delicate environments. Low density urban sprawls are devastating local micro-environments – one only has to see the high rise flats coming up next to lake shores in Kochi and the urbanisation in Munnar – as examples of such folly. Furthermore, with climate change continuing unchecked, Kerala is likely to experience more frequently, catastrophic climate related disasters. Several such have already occurred, both as intense local events or state wide ones. These will disadvantage particularly, those structures and urban sprawls that have extended into environmentally sensitive areas.”

Very prophetic words, indeed.

The next blog in the series is here.

This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here. 

They say that what is true of Kerala is generally not true of other states. That is not only true of its long standing position in the forefront of states with higher education and health indicators, but also of its spread out habitation patterns. For decades now, barring city states like Delhi, Kerala has had the highest density of people per square kilometre. The statement that Kerala is an urban-rural continuum is now made so routinely that it is a cliché. However, that is also not a recent phenomenon; Kerala’s spread out habitation patterns have been a feature of the past too.

Take my own ancestral village in Mankurussi village, Mankara Panchayat, Palakkad district. Here, not very far from the dense jungles of the Western Ghats, are the rich rice fields of Palakkad. The soil, contrary to popular notion, is not very rich in nutrients. Much of the clay and alluvium has been washed down from the low tumbling laterite hills into shallow valleys, now long since tended and moulded into paddy fields. The homes are crouched on these laterite hills; they may be as many or as few, depending upon the availability of water. Behind each such home there is usually a small, almost natural forest, known as a Thodiga. The trees vary in a Thodiga from the Palmyra to the locally known Kazhani, a twisted thorny tree that has excellent timber, to a few teak trees and the ubiquitous Jack and wild Mango. Thodigas act as water sinks, break the fall of the heavy rain, and soak it in like a sponge. They provide plenty for the family’s needs, from an occasional tree cut down for rafters and reapers for roofs – even the fibrous Palmyra transforms to dense timber over the years – to Jack and Mango fruit, mushrooms, Chena (amorphophallus yam) and Chembu (knows as Arbi in Hindi) and plenty of vines and shrubs useful for various Ayurvedic medicines.

To visit each home in Mankurussi, is not an easy task of just walking down a main street and a few side lanes. The old houses in Mankurussi dot the laterite hills and the village roads twists and turns through the Thodigas to reach them. There are people always on the roads, but one does not necessarily see their houses, tucked away as they are behind each home’s forest. And so, Mankurussi meanders into the next village and the next.

Back in the mid 1880s, when the British built their strategically important railway line linking Madras to Mangalore, the line dipped southward to Coimbatore and then went westward through the Palghat Gap, a 30 kilometre wide breach in the Western Ghats that provided the easiest entry to the west coast. The survey of the line went directly through the low laterite mound on which my forebears had built their mud and thatch naalukettu house; one with four sides and a courtyard enveloped within. My great grandfather, displaced from his home, built his next home on a hill not far away. The laterite was chipped away and a mud foundation rammed in. The walls were made of mud too, mixed with several ingredients, an art long lost to the world now, to provide an enormously strong structure that went up two floors. The earlier thatch was replaced with the more upmarket tiles in more prosperous times.

Over time, the homes in Mankurussi have become more modern. The old homes remain, but in their compounds are built new concrete boxes, brightly painted. Worse, in violation of the law that prohibits the conversion of low lying paddy land into other uses, homes have been built in them as well. The thodigas are now converted into more ‘useful’ spaces; these jungles have been replaced by rubber and coconut plantations. They are not quite the same thing; no leaf mold carpets the jungle floor.

With each such step, of replacing old ways with the new, the people of Kerala have become more vulnerable. Floods could inundate the houses in paddy lands, but what’s more, rubber and coconut plantations have not a fraction of the water absorbing quality of the thodigas they replaced.

When the rains hit Palakkad district last month, the Malampuzha dam was opened like the rest of the dams in Kerala, and water breached the banks of the Bharatapuzha River. The rain poured for several days, and water entered many modern concrete and steel homes. Those who built their homes in paddy fields were especially hard hit, as the flood waters rose. Yet, my grandfather’s hundred and thirty year old mud house, built without as much as a kilo of steel or cement stood impassively against the rain, with no damage at all.

This blog is part of a series on policy decisions, the causes and consquences of the Kerala floods. The first blog can be found here. 

To continue the chronology of events in the taming and deforestation of the Western Ghats with which I ended last week’s blog, in 1864, Dr. Dietrich Brandis, a qualified forester, was appointed as the first Inspector General of forests. He fortified the thinking of those days, that forests were a nearly inexhaustible resource for several materials essential for industrial progress, and therefore, the government had the first claim on whatever forests had to offer. His thinking dominated the provisions of the first Indian Forest Act, enacted in 1865. In 1878 the act was revised to provide for the classification of forests into Reserve and Protected forests and brought into force in provinces. In 1906, the Imperial Forest Research Institute established in Dehra Dun; it continues to be the premier institution for the training and capacity development of officials recruited into the Indian Forest Service. In 1910, a Board of Forestry was created at national level and in 1921, following the enactment of the Government of India Act 1919, forests become a provincial subject due to political reforms.

The institutional reforms of the last decades of the 19^th century, opened the floodgates – a grim metaphor in the light of the current devastation of Kerala – to the wholesale exploitation of India’s forests. These were destroyed extensively for timber, railway sleepers, charcoal (to manufacture producer gas that was used to run vehicles) and for food cultivation, forest conservation was basically focused on addressing colonial needs. Conservation was a monopoly; the ruthlessly guarded preserve of forest departments. They encouraged monocultures and planned afforestation, with scant regard, or even awareness of the grievous biodiversity loss that such policies would trigger. These tendencies found their peak during the First World War and then again, during the Second World War.

Kerala was not immune to these national trends. The Princely States of Cochin and Travancore followed the same path to prosperity. The Mullaperiyar dam was built on the upper reaches of the Periyar river a century back; the British needed the dam to take water over the Western Ghats to the parched rain shadow areas of Madras Presidency lying to the east of the Ghats. In the foothills of the Western Ghats to the east of Chalakudy, where much of the recent devastation by floods has happened, the Rajah of Cochin built the Chalakudy tramway, a wood fired narrow gauge railway line, which was entirely devoted to moving timber from the lush, tropical forests, to the river and the main railway line below. No trace of the line remains today, except for the embankments of the old railway line.

There was a clear conflict between the recognition of traditional rights of people and the needs of government too. And to the credit of conscientious people within the government, there were plenty of differences of opinion too, regarding the idea fostered by the Government of India that forests ought to be the government’s preserve. The Madras Presidency for instance, initially rejected the adoption of the 1876 Indian Forest Act on the ground that the traditional practices and rights of people to use forest produce were not recognised in this law. Later on, they buckled to the relentless pressure of the Government of India, and relented.

The first 25 years following independence saw a continuance of colonial forest policies. The National Forest Policy 1952, while it drew attention to evolving systems of balanced and complimentary land-use, checking denudation in mountainous regions, river bank erosion, and sea erosion and sand dune shifting, establishing tree lands for community utilisation in order to deflect pressure from forests and improving grazing grounds and fuel wood availability, also spoke the language of exploitation. It said that forests must be managed for the sustained supply of timber and other forest produce required for defence, communications and industry and maximisation of annual revenue in perpetuity consistent with the fulfilment of the needs enumerated in the policy. The integration of princely States and nationalisation led to further loss of forests. Even though the biodiversity conservation movement began to pick up, it was not strong enough to stem the progressive loss of forest habitats. The focus continued to be on revenue earning from timber and commercial forestry. The subject of ‘Forests’ was also shifted from the State list, to the Concurrent list in the Constitution.

In Kerala, after Independence, the lower reaches of the Periyar’s tributaries were dammed by the Peechi and Vazhani dams and the main river was again dammed by the Idukki hydro-electric project. An engineering achievement that involved an underground power house as well. Finally, not less than thirty five major and minor dams have been constructed in Kerala. Each one of them has considerably submerged precious forest and diminished the sponge like quality of the Western Ghats. The only success of any note by conservationists was the successful thwarting of the idea of building a dam in the Silent Valley in the northern part of the Western Ghats. This would have destroyed the habitat of several rare species of animals and plants, including that of the Lion Tailed Macaque, a shy, tree dwelling primate that is rarer than the tiger in India.