Forgotten lessons
The Union Environment Ministry’s recent order diluting the restrictions on activities such as sand quarrying in the ecologically sensitive areas of the Western Ghats is a cause for concern, especially in the context of
the floods that devastated Kerala in August.
IN a State that witnessed the century’s worst floods barely five months ago, an order issued by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on December 3 removing the restrictions on “destructive activities” such as mining and quarrying in a 3,115 square kilometre area spread over 123 ecologically sensitive area (ESA) villages of Kerala has surprisingly been welcomed by all major political parties.
The images of wayward rivers and the unending series of landslides wreaking havoc on the State are, however, fresh in public memory. Villages at the foothills all along the Western Ghats districts, a number of them located near granite quarries, bore the brunt of the destruction. The floods devastated 774 of the 1,564 villages in the State, directly affecting 54 lakh people of the total estimated population of 3.5 crore.
The State has been struggling since then to find the huge amount of financial and natural resources required to rebuild itself. According to the final Post Disaster Needs Assessment report prepared by a United Nations expert team, Kerala will need Rs.31,000 crore for its rebuilding efforts. There are reports also of an extreme shortage of building material. Scientific assessments had concluded that the impact of the floods was as severe as it was because of the reckless human intervention
R. KRISHNAKUMAR
on the hills and the plains in the past decades. The State government had, therefore, committed itself to rebuilding Kerala in an eco-friendly manner. But political games over the sensitive issue of protection of the Western Ghats have kept the highrange districts, with their huge population of settler farmers led by powerful religious, economic and political interests, on the boil for over five years now. It had also proved to be a key election issue for political parties in the hill areas in districts such as Idukki and Wayanad, as demonstrated especially in the Lok Sabha election in 2014.
As another Lok Sabha election approaches, the order issued by the