A deluge and its lessons
BRP Bhaskar Gulf Today
Kerala, whose people, Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has graciously acknowledged as a part of the UAE’s success story, is beginning a slow process of recovery after being battered by unusually heavy rains in the past fortnight. As rivers and backwaters across the state rose, many stayed put at home, ignoring the government’s advice to move to safe areas. In many places flood waters reached up to terraces of two-storey buildings, and thousands had to be evacuated by helicopter or boat and sent to relief camps. Educational institutions were closed and their premises and other buildings including places of worship were turned into relief centres. On Sunday officials put the last five days’ toll at 220 dead. About one million people were in relief camps. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who put off a scheduled visit to the US for medical treatment to personally supervise the massive operations, said the floods were the worst in a century. No reliable estimates of property losses were available immediately. On a superficial view, the devastating floods were a natural calamity caused by the heaviest rainfall in living memory. Some localities received last week as much as ten times the normal rainfall. However, viewed against recent socio-economic developments, the floods are a result of unplanned and unregulated interference with Nature’s scheme of things. That raises the question whether those involved in such activity will draw appropriate lessons from this experience. Social and educational advancement had put the Kerala region ahead of the rest of India early in the last century. By 1970, though economically backward, the state astounded the world by registering indices of social progress comparable to those of the industrialised West. Due to lack of job opportunities closer to home, during the British period itself, Keralites had started moving to the rest of India and to other colonies like Ceylon, Singapore and Malaya, looking for employment. The character and quality of job migration changed half a century ago as professionals like engineers, doctors and nurses found openings in the West. When the oil boom triggered massive developmental activity in the Gulf States, Keralites discovered a new world of opportunities. A narrow strip of land on India’s southwest coast, Kerala is about 520 km long from north to south, and the distance from the Arabian Sea to the Western Ghats is about 120 km at the broadest point. Its 38,863 sq kms (just over one per cent of India’s area) holds some 35 million people (about three per cent of India’s population). About 10% of Keralites work abroad and their remittances play a big role in the state’s economy. Geographically, Kerala comprises a coastline, a mountainous region and the plains between them. All three have been subject to much depredations. Organised destruction of forests by encroachers, which began in the 1950s, disturbed the rhythm of nature, leading to decline in rainfall, drop in groundwater levels and drying up of rivers. Remittances from abroad spurred massive construction activity all across the state. Lakes and farmlands were filled up, hills flattened and rocks broken down to build homes and shopping complexes. After the National Geographic Traveler identified Kerala, which advertises itself as God’s Own Country, as a must-see destination the state experienced a tourist boom. Resorts came up on the coast, along the backwaters and in the hills to cater to foreign and domestic tourists. Sociologists had once classified Kerala, with continuous habitation, as a rural-urban continuum. The urban population having gone up from 16.2% in 1971 to 47.7% in 2011 (it is now estimated to be above 50%0), is evolving into a 500-km-long urban continuum, without a parallel anywhere on earth. All six cities of the state and a majority of its 87 municipal towns form part of this urban Milky Way. There are also three large airports in it. One of them, built on reclaimed farmlands, was inundated last week, and had to suspend operations. A fourth airport will open in November. This year’s unprecedented floods were a direct result of the heavy concretisation of all regions and disappearance of the traditional rainwater reservoirs like paddy fields. According to eminent ecologist Madhav Gadgil it was a disaster waiting to happen. If civil society campaigns had not succeeded in blocking some projects with immense potential for environmental damage, like the Silent Valley hydro-electric project, six-laning of the coastal highway and construction of a new highway on the hills, the floods may well have extracted an even higher price in terms of lives and property. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, August 21, 2018.