Are the floods in Kerala Nature’s fury or is it a manmade disasterij With 417 deaths, lakhs displaced from their homes and property worth crores destroyed, State authorities say it is a natural calamity but environmentalists and water management experts insist that it is man’s doing.VR Jayaraj tells you more
The worst part of the deluge is almost over in Kerala. It is time for relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction and stock-taking. At the administrative level, the officials are busy searching for the resources to help the millions affected by the disaster, unprecedented in the history of the State, and for restoring, rebuilding and repairing infrastructure that have been pounded by the rain, floodwater and millions of tons of mud and rocks spewed by about 200 landslides in seven of the total 14 districts. At the political level, disputes are raging over who all can contribute to the efforts for putting the State back on the tracksij How it should be utilised and who all had taken part to what extent in the rescue and relief worksij The question nobody sincerely wants to ask — though the Opposition parties in the State are blaming the Government —is what exactly caused this disaster, the real extent, magnitude and dimensions of which are yet to be estimatedij
For 11 days — from August 8, rains lashed entire Kerala. A minimum of 250 people and a million domestic animals have died. More than 13 lakh people had to take shelter, thousands of homes have been destroyed totally or washed away and tens of thousands of houses suffered terrible damage; nearly 1 lakh km of road is damaged, over a 100 major bridges are destroyed or weakened, crops in over 60,000 hectares of land is lost.
As per the Government’s preliminary calculations, the losses could come to the tune of over 120,000 crore but the reality is that rehabilitation of the affected people, reconstruction of what has been lost and for what Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan calls the “creation of a new Kerala” could cost over Rs 100,000 crore, according to experts.
This is the material crisis of the deluge. A humanitarian crisis is brewing as post-deluge trauma is setting in for people who have no place to return to, whose livelihood has been affected, whose factories, shops, crop, farmland and livestock have been lost forever. The very soil on which they stood and worked for generations has been washed away from right under their feet and there is no way of replacing it. By the time this article comes out in print, Onam, Keralites’ ‘national festival’ would be over but a quarter of the 35 million people in the State would have skipped it not because they wanted to but because they were incapable of celebrating it — financially and psychologically incapable of even thinking about it. People who took shelter in the relief camps do not even have a change of clothes. The stench while approaching the areas from where water is receding and the sludge, slime, mud and insects and worms that fill inundated the houses are warnings of an outbreak of epidemics.
“The Government has promised to rebuild their lives and whatever they have lost in the floods and landslides but everyone knows that it can’t do that. I am not a cynic when I say that such promises have never been fulfilled in the required extent after any natural disaster in Kerala,” Jayakumar Prabhakaran, a social activist from Idukki, the district worst hit by the natural disaster, says. Many like Jayakumar are content by calling the Kerala deluge a natural disaster but the fact is that it was not a handiwork of God or Nature but a man-made disaster.
“The Government, the ruling party or a good part of the very people hit by it will not and can’t admit this reality. But this unparalleled disaster was brought about by people who would use any trick to stay on in power, by bureaucrats and technicians who put technicalities and monetary obligations above human lives and by avaricious humans who don’t develop a conscience while inflicting irreparable injuries on the very Nature that provides them with everything,” Mohandas Nair, a hydrologist working for conservation of rivers and wetlands, argues.
The deaths and devastation caused by the rains had come about in Kerala in two forms.
First, was the avalanche of water, rocks, mud and uprooted trees and diversion of rivers triggered by landslides and mud-slips in the ecologically ravaged mountainous regions of Wayanad, Kannur, Kozhikode, Thrissur, Idukki and Pathanamthitta districts.
Second, was unimaginable flooding of already rain-swollen rivers, their banks and basins in Wayanad, Thrissur, Ernakulam, Idukki, Pathanamthitta and Alappuzha district, caused by the bewildering rush of water released at rates of millions of gallons per second without issuing proper and timely warning to people from the major dams in Idukki, Pathanamthitta, Ernakulam, Thrissur and Wayanad districts.
“We should understand that not even ten percent of the total deaths – perhaps I am exaggerating a bit – were the direct result of flooding caused by the torrential rains,”a former engineer of the State Water Resources Department who had throughout his career cried for proper flood warning and management systems, tells you.
In short, dams and their mismanagement caused one part of the disaster and systematic and ruthless rape of Nature by avaricious people including the sand and stone quarry capitalists caused the other, according to environmentalists. That Kerala would be receiving excess rainfall in the first monsoon season (southwestern monsoon) this year was evident in July. That is why the water level in the giant, three-dam Idukki hydel reservoir system had shown signs of hitting the maximum storage level of 2,403 feet by July end. That is why the Government and the Kerala State Electricity Board which owns and manages these dams and reservoir decided to go through a trial run on July 31 when the level reached 2,398 feet after giving proper and systematic warning to the people downstream. But then the rains subsided and the KSEB conveniently forgot about it on the basis or the logic its chairman NS Pillai put forward the other day. “If we keep all the five shutters of the Cheruthoni dam (one of the three dams of Idukki reservoir) for an hour, the power generation loss is worth Rs 10 lakh,” he said.
When there was time to empty the excess water in lesser volumes and thus maintain the level in the reservoir at safe points, the Government and the KSEB did not do it. “They might have thought that it might not rain heavily again despite the weather forecasts about truant atmospheric behaviour,” a former KSEB engineer at the Idukki hydel project, says.
Rain with all its fury revisited entire Kerala on August 8. By then things had got out of the Board’s control. People living downstream of river Periyar into which the dam shutters would open were notified of the situation though there was no time for evacuation. At noon on July 9, one shutter of the Cheruthoni dam opened to release water at 50 cubic metres per second (cumecs). By August 15 this had to be raised to 1,700 cumecs which is a discharge of 1.7 million litres per second washing away hundreds of houses and everything that stood straight on the fertile mountain all the way down to Aluva and Paravur in Ernakulam district 80 km away.
The callousness shown by the KSEB and the authorities was seen in the case of the Idamalayar hydel reservoir. The waters which had to be released at up to 1,000 cumecs when the rain continued and the reservoir water level crossed the maximum of 169 metres. The only difference was, this time, no proper warning was given. The only alert was to stay 100 metres away from the river banks. When the massive volumes of water from both Idukki and Idamalayar rushed down Periyar, it swallowed areas up to 5 km from the river normal waterline in Perumbavoor, Aluva, Paravur, forcing suspension of operations of the Kochi International Airport for a fortnight and even threatening to flood Kochi city, 20 km south of Aluva.
“Did the authorities have any idea about what the dam waters would doij Did they have any estimates of how much the water level would rise in the river in such a situationij Did they abide by the water management protocolij Or did they have any such thingij There was nothing. They waited till the last moment and just pushed all the water on to the people and areas downstream. Even after all this, they keep arguing that it is a natural disaster,” environmentalist Rajeev Babu, laments.
The failure or callousness by the Electricity Board was evident in the case of the Peringalkuthu hydel reservoir in Thrissur district where the water flows down the Chalakkudy river, famous on tourist circles across the world for the magnificent Athirapally waterfalls. No clear warning was given while opening the shutters of the Peringalkuthu dam, a process that was unavoidable also because of the down-rush from the Sholayar reservoir upstream. The waters gushing down from Peringalkuthu devastated almost the entire area — a minimum of 30 panchayats and municipal areas in Thrissur district, destroyed hundreds of homes forcing tens of thousands from their homes to relief camps. Even the Wayanad District Collector, head of the district disaster management authority, complained that the KSEB had not informed him before opening the shutters in the Banasurasagar hydel reservoir’s dam, the second largest dam in India. The insensitive KSEB action led to near-total devastation of homes and farmlands in seven panchayats on the banks of River Kabani, the flooding of which had its impact even in neighbouring Karnataka which was forced to release massive volumes of water from Beechanahalli for several days.
More disastrous was the effect of the carelessness shown by the State Government and the Board in the opening of the dam shutters of the eight-dam Sabarigiri hydel project in Pathanamthitta without a warning. The down-rush of the water from the from the reservoirs made River Pamba to take a diversion at Pamba, the base camp for the Sabarimala pilgrims, destroying everything there and forcing the authorities to block pilgrims from progressing to the hill shrine for the Niraputhari festival for Onam puja. The waters of River Pamba swelled all its tributaries and branches like Achankovilar and caused massive destruction and displacement of people in Ranni, a town that has never seen a flood in the past and rendered lakhs of people in Chengannur in Alappuzha district homeless and local Marxist MlA Saji Cherian went on record to say: “Tens of thousands of people are going to be killed here.” Ranni’s CPI(M) MlA Raju Abraham said” “I had been telling them (the Board and other authorities) that things were getting out of hand but they did not take my words seriously. This has led to this situation.”
Even when his own party’s legislators and leaders were furious about the authorities’ insensitivity, the Chief Minister has no scruples about it when he asked: “If dams were the reason for this disaster, how has flooding occurred in rivers that have no damsij”
Of course, the immediate reason for the yet-to-end deluge in Kerala was the callousness and shortsightedness with which the Electricity Board, the various district administrations and above all the State administration had handled the process of discharging excess water from the swollen reservoirs but environmentalists are asking a more pertinent question: Can Kerala with a steep-lying topography, a tiny strip of 600 km X 100 km trapped land caught between the Arabian Sea and the mighty Western Ghats that rose to altitude beyond 6,000 feet at some points, afford to have so many big damsij
“No,” says Mohanan MR, an environmentalist from Thrissur. “These dams, especially the big one’s like Idukki which can be described as an artificial seas on hilltops, will remain a threat to Kerala. They are not dams but water bombs,” he tells you.
Kerala has now seen what these dams and their careless handling can do to us and this land just when rainfall exceeded by only 41 per cent of the normal. What would happen if a deluge visits the State like the one of 1924 in which entire Munnar was devastated and rivers drew their new routes and maps on their ownij he asks.
“Still we are crying for more dams in extremely eco-sensitive spots like Athirapally when the fact is that these dams are producing only 30 per cent of the electricity we are consumingij Should we live in paranoia just for thisij” Mohanan says emphatically.
Nature’s wrath To inhuman violation
Mar Remegios Inchananiyil, Syro-Malabar Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Thamarassery, a northern Kerala region populated mostly with settler farmers from the south of the State, is a person who agrees with the charge that the flood situation was worsened by the callous attitude shown by the KSEB and the State Government in handling the process of opening of dam shutters. But talk to him about the role of the hundreds of stone quarries, construction of multi-storey buildings, resorts and palatial houses on the steep slopes, loose-soil hill slopes and land-leveling quarries across the Western Ghats, he gets angry. “I don’t think so. If there are people who think so, they should first abandon luxuries. They should give up living in big houses, travelling in fancy cars and putting air conditioners in every room. All the landslides had happened inside the jungle. There has been no landslide near any quarry,” he argues.
Keralites are hypocritical when it comes to the question of eco-responsible development. That very factor seems to be the reason behind the loss of so many human lives and property this monsoon. Contrary to the claim of the likes of Mar Inchananiyil, most of the landslides that had led to massive destruction and large numbers of deaths had occurred in hilly areas hit by widespread and intense human intervention while forest areas that remain relatively virgin remained untouched. A quick look at the landslide disasters proves it: Vythiri in Wayanad district, Thiruvambady in Kozhikode, Kottiyoor and Iritti in Kannur, Nilambur in Malappuram, Kuranchery in Thrissur, Nenmara in Palakkad and Idukki, Munnar and other areas in Idukki district are places where most of the landslides took place. These areas which are thickly populated and highly urbanised come under the category of ecologically fragile lands where no development activity should be have been allowed in the first place. The forested area with uncontrolled human intervention saw 150 landslides and mud-slips this monsoon.
Pune-based ecologist Madhav Gadgil had years back prepared a document containing a proposal to conserve and protect the Western Ghats but the settler farmers, politicians and religious groups literally chased him and his recommendations away. He proposed a ban on stone quarries, all kinds of constructions, land-leveling, use of plastics, extravagant and extensive tourism activities and use of pesticides. The advocates of unbridled development spewed venom at him and staged protests forcing the then UPA Government to constitute a second committee headed by space scientist K Kasturirangan who had no ecology-environment background with the obvious intention of putting together an alternative report on the conservation of the Western Ghats ecology.
Even the much watered down recommendations of the Kasturirangan Committee were not acceptable. Gadgil now correctly points out that the floods and related disasters would not have been this horrific had his proposal been implemented even partially.
The Western Ghats are being systematically and ruthlessly raped by encroachers most of whom are described by the successive Governments as settler farmers, investors, tourism and housing projects.
This eroding of Nature became all the more vicious in the past quarter-century of economic reforms and liberalisation which demanded large-scale real estate activity for which the Ghats were mined extensively for stone by the quarry mafia.
“As man continued his senseless interventions for profit and comfort, Nature too was becoming more and more insecure and fatigued. What we just saw — landslides and mud-slips that killed scores of people — was the Nature’s reaction to that inhuman violation,” environmentalist Babu KV from Nedumkandom, Idukki, tells you.
