Stench of destruction haunts Kerala
MORE than a week after the floodwaters began subsiding, animal carcasses are still floating in Kerala’s backwaters, and a nauseating stench rises like a wall when the wake from a passing boat breaks the surface.
These inland lagoons running parallel to the coast are one of the biggest tourist draws in India’s most south-westerly state, but the stain of death and devastation wrought by Kerala’s worst floods in a century will take longer than a season to wash away.
The quaint towns and villages scattered between the lush forests and paddy fields bordering the backwaters are now communities in despair.
Houses in low-lying areas are still submerged, roads are waterlogged and the sewage from drains has washed into channels that are too slow-moving to effectively flush out the effluent.
Sudarsanan TK, a houseboat owner in the town of Alappuzha, had been looking forward to the peak tourist season, but as his home disappeared under 2.5m of water, his family have to live aboard the boat he would otherwise be renting to tourists from Europe, China, Malaysia and India.
“I have nothing left but this houseboat. I don’t know how I can repay my bank loan in this condition. The bank may take back my boat. I will have nothing at all then,” Sudarsanan, a 64-year-old father-of-two, said.
About 1 500 houseboats are tied up at Alappuzha, going nowhere, with many owners still paying off loans taken to buy the boats.
Sudarsanan owes about $8 600 (R122 000) on the loan taken eight years ago to buy the boat, and he could have earned up to $7 000 by December if the deluge hadn’t washed away his hopes.
Hundreds of people perished in the flood and more than a million of Kerala’s 35 million people were forced to abandon their homes and take shelter in relief camps.
Blessed with natural beauty, fertile land and bountiful seas, Kerala has been dubbed “God’s own country” by its people, but the Marxists running the state government reckon it will need $3.6 billion to rebuild over the next two years.
“Kerala’s GDP growth may fall by 2%,” state Finance Minister Thomas Isaac said, forecasting growth of 6% for the financial year ending next March.
Crops have been lost, the construction industry was dead for a month, and tourism, which contributes 10% of the state’s economy but accounts for about 25% of job creation, has been badly hit.
For discerning tourists looking for a more laidback Indian experience, Kerala has it all – long sandy beaches, lazy waterways, charming historic towns like Kochi and the cool, forested hills of the Western Ghats.
Kerala doesn’t draw numbers like the northern tourist circuit, the so-called “Golden Triangle” running from New Delhi to the Taj Mahal in Agra, and Jaipur’s palaces in the desert state of Rajasthan, but it has carved out a sizeable niche.
Last year, a million foreigners visited Kerala, along with 15 million domestic tourists, but state government and industry officials reckon the flood will result in losses for the tourism sector of $357m.
Thousands of volunteers have joined a clean-up campaign, and Shilendran M, an executive with the CGH Earth luxury hotel chain, expects some kind of order to be restored within the next few weeks.
“The state administration is working on a war footing,” said Shilendran, whose group has more than a dozen properties in Kerala, but “we are limping back to normal”.
Hardly anywhere in the state escaped the calamity.
Ernakulam district, the biggest industrial and tourism contributor to Kerala’s economy and home to the historic city of Kochi, suffered major damage, and its busy international airport was shut for nearly two weeks.
Munnar, a hill resort overlooking the tea and cardamom plantations high in the Ghats, was cut off after bridges were washed away and landslides blocked roads.
Once every dozen years, a bright purplish-blue bell-shaped flower called the Neelakurinji blossoms on the slopes around Munnar – and this was one of those years.
The state tourism department had marketed 2018 as Kurinji year, but people in Kerala are more likely to remember the mud.