On the Verge of Forgetting its Environmental Roots – Wayanad in the Crossroads

For an average visitor entering Wayanad, the region is usually a staging post to travel further south to Cochin, to Calicut or to Southern Kerala. You hardly roll down the window when the clear sky becomes dark due to the madly dense canopy, you think about the impending vomit of your children now that the hills are twisting, you do gaze at the fields and wonder about charming the greenery of God's Own Country. As you reach closer to the border of this hilly district, you will yourself to sleep as there are no longer any interesting buildings to watch and speculate the prices of, neither are there any towns to buy your regular snacks from.

But for a curious visitor, the eyes pop out as you enter this magical land of the forests. You invariably become a poet watching the clouds over Brahmagiri, wondering if you can get a glimpse of the Chembra. The curious visitor is enthralled when visiting Wayanad, the land of the plentiful, a land draped with bamboo and grasses and shrubs and hills and rolling grasslands.

However, Wayanad is nothing but a microcosm of the larger scenario in the nation. Wayanad was and still is, one of the least densely populated districts of the state of Kerala. One of the northern districts of Kerala with a substantial indigenous population and a degree of backwardness that is an aberration to the overall growth oriented outlook of Kerala, the land faces all the problems that Bulandshahr or Tirunelveli face, yet it suffers the ignominy of a century old exploitative system.

There are hardly any destitute poverty-stricken people hanging around. Visiting here from Eastern Uttar Pradesh, one would amaze at the number of vehicles, number of public buses, innumerable bakery shops and so many umbrellas, that popular umbrella companies infact have their showrooms in most of the towns of the district. But Mananthwady, Sultan Bathery and many more small towns and villages have a story to tell.

The story is that Wayanad did a fast forward leap to modernity, sidelining the vast populations of indigenous people, who could not adjust to modernity in the modern sense of the word. The region gains notoriety when discussions are made of suicide of pepper and coffee farmers, Whispers in hushed tones are heard about the increased prostitution amongst the destitute and above all these parts are spoken about for the land grab that thrived for decades and sidelined adivasis to its extreme corners.

Wayanad perhaps is a metaphor for all things that could go wrong while promoting development in environmentally rich regions and a lesson to newer regions that are opening up for the sake of industrial development.

Truth remains that Wayanad is a very rich place, both materially and in the count of natural and physical capital. The district is one of the highest contributors to Kerala's economy, supplying most of the coffee, pepper and several spices as well a myriad variety of forest products.

The tragedy of these hills is that they have been exploited beyond their means. Policies and programmes have taken more and returned less to the land, indigenous people have seen their ancestral lands snatched by powerful interests and above all, there has hardly been significant media coverage of the continual disenfranchisement of the original inhabitants of the district. Infact, when it comes to Wayanad, almost everyone is a migrant in the correct sense of the word. Nobody belongs to Wayanad.

 

However, beyond the scholarly debate of poverty, adivasis realise that the hunger for land is the cause for their misery. It was common knowledge in the 80s and 90s that with increasing exploitation of the hitherto forest soils, productivity decreases and the search for land further grows. As adivasis got pushed further to forest fringes, they came into increasing conflict with elephants who found that their vast forests were wiped out and had begun venturing into lush agricultural fields. Retrospectively, both the early migrants and the adivasis now accept the fact that they were pawns in the hands of a far cleverer machinery that saw the region as nothing more than an infinite resource base.

In the Wayanad of today, rivers are running dry and unduly high rainfall often causes landslides. Forests continue to be under threat and newer migrants keep arriving. Pushed by strong lobbies, the desire for land grows and if land cannot be obtained, the outcry against marauding elephants and straying tigers grow. The demonized elephants have little respite and often enter into small holdings managed by adivasis, destroying their meagre savings. This leads to a vicious circle as the demand for controlling the wild population takes a shrill outcry.

However, this apparently no-holds-barred land grabbers did not take into account an ecologically rich landscape teeming with life, where nature cannot be wished away. For if the forests are wished away, the elephants need to be exterminated as a pest, a job prospect nobody in his right mind would relish.

However, there is a change undergoing in Wayanad currently. While Wayanad is no one's ancestral home, except for the indigenous people who have lived in the primeval forests for long, it is now referred to as home by many who live here for decades. Second or third generation migrants see the forest as an integral part of Wayanad, a sea change from early migrants who viewed the then vast forests as a resource to be logged and burnt and pillaged. For them, the forest was a dark brooding competitor in the land starved minds of most people.

These citizens of Wayanad are infact a part of a story of hope, fathers destroyed large forests, children now rebuilding. They are birders, take part in animal census regularly, conduct environmental classes, ensuring poaching reduces and are striving for greater engagement of all stakeholders, especially adivasis.

And as new age forest dwellers, adivasis and non-adivasis team up to ensure that there is no elephant poaching under watch. The grouse remains that it was the government which very often allowed migrants to grow turmeric, ginger and tapioca cultivation and encouraged active conversion of land, in the present era, these small scale holders continue to be blamed for much of the region’s land use problems.

However, current land use practices such as a proposed new dam, improbable railway lines, widening of roads for highways and an insatiable rush to build the green land with concrete are not decried to the extent they should be. And many are complicit.

Rice wetlands turned into banana or areca nut plantation or worse a housing project or a resort. The region truly is at its ecological tipping point.

So, what can we do. Locally, a whatsapp group to dispel rumours and share information has been of tremendous help and reading spaces are encouraged. And villagers continue to be still ok with elephants eating some coconut or walking across the fields. Circumstances of angst develop when elephants come and eat everything and an official shares the rule book which stipulates that compensation can only be given for 10 year old plantations but people are still ok with an occasional thief – a memory recalled by a friend as the time he saw his first elephant from his house window and this perhaps made him into a lover of ecology.

However, a far more complex layer of problems seem to be affecting the region’s ecology as the influx of large sums of money has created a new Frankenstein – a land grabbing one. And large farmers who are mostly landowners and have large commercial stakes are also prominent amongst those who ask for more state control and less community role in mitigating human wildlife conflict.

Being mostly plantation owners or mono-culturists, many large farmers in fact suffer disproportionately more due to a lack of diversity amongst crops and do lose a large amount of produce. Small scale agriculturalists grow all sort of multiple crops and can absorb losses that while not economical significant, is an acknowledgement of the close relationship of local farmers and their adopted home

While land is valued at gold, trees come a close second. Trees are the most expensive asset in a plantation as the cost of coffee and pepper rates vary while tree rates do not fluctuate. Trees are also highly in demand with most of it going in long convoys outside of Wayanad.

When finally making sense of the Wayand of today especially now when the landslide shook the core of every everyone, sitting far they be, one remembers a conversation with a Kattunaicken long years back. Somewhere near Tholpetty, he said that if agriculture fluctuates like this, our lives are going to be very miserable. He estimated that in 50 years, the paddy fields will get drier, there will be no water in the hillocks, traditional farming practices will die and even the big plantations will suffer, with water pipelines adding to the ever-rising cost of growing cash crops. Forests already seem to getting drier. We can feel it.

Wayanad has grown at an uncanny pace. The pace of land use change far outstrips any similar region And nature seems to be changing its routines. We have for far too long toyed with nature and now, Wayanad seems to be giving early signals for what it could mean for vulnerable populations in a land vastly transformed in a few decades.