In Drought-Hit Kerala, CM Vijayan Rushes to Make Most of Monsoons
Scientists have already painted a grim picture of Kerala going dry in the coming years in a changing climate.
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Pre-monsoon rains are already on and monsoon is expected to hit Kerala two days ahead of schedule this time. Kerala is mainland India’s doorstep for the monsoon where it enters with clockwork precision on 1 June, usually. Now that the rains are here, Kerala has a chance to catch it where it falls, and a policy push to this effect came from Chief Minister Pinarai Vijayan, who is not known for his green sentiments. Extraordinary times in Kerala often demand extraordinary measures.
This tropical state, lying between 8°18′ and 12°48′ North latitudes, receives annual average rain of 3,107 mm, enough to sustain rainforests that the state is home to. Even Kerala’s dryer parts get 1,500 mm rain, which is more than India’s country average.
The concern is that all that is going to be an old tale at some point. Scientists have already painted a grim picture of Kerala going dry in the coming years in a changing climate, with rising cities and vanishing forests and farmlands. They say omens are already visible.
Serious Crop Losses
During the drought, Kerala’s farmers have suffered serious crop losses and even wetland ecosystems that ensured bumper crops turned saline and barren with no fresh water inputs.
Ornithologists have reported dry land birds flocking to dry lakebeds, and foresters feared wild animals would enter villages in search of water, while dry grass and bamboo posed wildfire risk. A “grave situation” is what Revenue Minister E Chandrasekharan called it in his budget speech in March.
Last year, the southwestern monsoon rainfall during June-September was short by about a third; and the northeastern monsoon came late with an even bigger deficit.
Managing Water
Vijayan has urged local bodies to use Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme, which ensures 100 days of work to every poor rural household, to build check dams and clean canals and ponds. The centre has announced Kerala as drought-hit, funding the scheme even more.
Vijayan has welcomed schools, colleges, local self-help groups called Kudumbashree and local governance institutions to contribute to conserve water in the state’s countless ponds and wells, and save rivers, canals and lagoons that run along and across the whole state.
The chief minster’s green mission, known as “Haritha Keralam”, aims at conserving, cleaning and clearing up these water bodies. Vijayan said in a media statement:
At a local level, where Kerala has a vibrant Panchayati Raj system, the government has urged the local institutions as well as 200,000 volunteers of Kudumbashree to chip in to the efforts. ‘Kudumbashree’ is the women’s empowerment and poverty eradication program, framed and enforced by the State Poverty Eradication Mission (SPEM) of the Government of Kerala.
State Subsidies
The local bodies are promoting rainwater harvesting in houses, with the state government providing subsidies to install rooftop water harvesting systems.
The state’s low-cost housing lobby comprising architects, environmentalists and planners has been promoting water conservation at household levels. At a recent fair at the state capital, they demonstrated harvesting and filtering techniques, and pushed it as a solution to a dip in groundwater levels. As per the 2001 Census, 72 percent of households used water from open wells, but their numbers reduced to 62 percent by 2011.
As for civil society efforts, ‘Mazhapolima’ (Bounty of Rain), an NGO based in the central district of Thrissur, has floated a participatory effort at groundwater recharge using shallow dug wells. After its success in Thiruvilwamala, the birthplace of the iconic Malayalam writer Vadakke Koottala Narayanankutty Nair, the technique is now catching up elsewhere as well.
Reining in Water Extraction
Besides promoting such efforts, the government is considering control on ground water extraction, as minister Chandrasekharan stated in his budget speech. Besides, industry-scale extraction of ground, destruction of the Western Ghats ecosystem and deforestation, bad building practices are also contributing to a trend of water shortage according to some of the green architects.
Sloped roofs that are exceptionally good at directing water from the surface into the guttering and to collection points gave way to concrete flat roofs during the construction boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The concrete flat roofs are inefficient in terms of insulation from heat and directing water. There has been a very slow reverse trend of late.
Another trend that prevents water seepage into the well is the practice of paving or plastering the space around houses, leading to flush drainage of water in a matter of minutes. Exposed loose sand, soil or lawn would aid seepage of rainwater into the ground contributing to wells and ground water aquifers.
Architect G Shankar, a Padmasree award winner who heads the Habitat Technology Group in Thiruvananthapuram, says much of the prevalent building practices go against the housing ethos of the state and the environment.
Drying Forests
Not only have Kerala’s farmlands, villages and cities been affected by the drought, but also Kerala forests and water holes have been drying up, potentially driving animals to villages in search of water; and dried grass and bamboo posing threat the wildfires that are rare in Kerala.
In northern Kerala, at the southern tip of the Deccan plateau on the Western Ghats slopes, 200 waterholes in three forest ranges of Wayanad district have dried up, forest officials said. In Muthanga range, there are 60 water holes and Bathery 100 and Hurichiyat 40, from which around 400 elephants, 60 tigers and hundreds of bison, bears, deer and monkeys drint
That means the local forest streams have dried up.
Forest officials said the Kabani River, one of the rare east flowing rivers in the state with its two tributaries Panamaram and Mananthavady, were helping them tide over the water crisis. In Muthanga, range officer S Heeralal and colleagues were planning earthen bunds (embankments) and tarpaulin-lined artificial ponds to store water.
Three Reasons
Environmentalists have pointed to three reasons behind the water crisis in the forests. Many rocky structures along the Western Ghats foothills are being flattened by quarry operations, thereby killing springs close to their origins.
Environmentalists and local officials have been lobbying to put a stop to rampant deforestation and construction in an around Wayanad. A recent drive to demolish illegal constructions in the region has stumbled on protests from migrant farmers and political and religious groups that patronize them to the point that the whole operation had to slow down.
In Kerala, which calls itself the God’s Own Country, drought is a not just a climate and weather-related phenomenon. At the same time, Keralans are also historically known for collective social action to save their environment as displayed by protests scrapping the Silent Vally dam project in rare rainforest back in the 1980s.
(This article was originally published in VillageSquare.in.)
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