VR Jayaraj brings you an alarming report on the slow but sustained desertification of India’s green bowl — Kerala
Kerala is going through its worst drought in over a century. The State, described as God’s Own Country, is today just a spectre of its glorious past for looks and natural, climatic, geological and hydrological content.
The stark difference is all too apparent if you travel from Walayar wilderness or Kasaragod sands in the north to Kaliyikkavila in the south or from the border west of Amaravathi in Tamil Nadu through the Marayur forest and the expanses of Munnar tea gardens to Kochi, the Queen of Arabian Sea.
Several of the 41 rivers that criss-cross the State from East to West fail to meet the sea. The once-mighty Nila that had bred and brought up unique local civilisations on its banks with its abundant blue waters is a yellow mirror reflecting the unbearable heat of the cruel summer sun. Over 90 per cent of the thousands of natural and artificial ponds and tanks are have dried up, killing the flora nurtured by them through centuries and killing or driving out thousands of species of fauna to whatever wet terrains that are left. large water bodies, like the mesmerisingly beautiful Vembanad lake, have shrunk by alarming proportions and whatever is left of it is a virtual carrier of human, plastic and organic waste.
At least two great freshwater lakes — Sasthamkotta and Vellayani — of southern Kerala that have so far served as providers of the most essential life-fluid for lakhs of human beings and crores of other forms of life, are in a dying process which has undergone shocking acceleration this summer. Groundwater level is sinking by dangerous proportions and over 80 per cent of seven million open wells in the State are deep pits of dry despair. Scores of borewells measuring hundreds of feet into the rocky globe beneath the soil cover are being abandoned due to drying up.
“The picture may not provide us with any relief. In fact, it should shock us all,” says hydrologist Ajith Kumar who has been studying the way the soil under our feet has been losing its water content over the past 25 years. “Groundwater depletion has been taking place for several decades but it had never been as alarming as it’s been in the past half-decade. Since 2012, the groundwater level has gone down at least by two to four metres and that justifies the drying up of open wells, borewells, ponds and tanks. Even Government hydrologists, doing almost nothing to decelerate the process, agree with this figure. The tragedy is that replenishment often fails to take place, like in the last monsoon season when the rain Gods betrayed us,” he points out.
The magnitude of the tragedy is immense. Mangalam, a village in Thrissur district with less than 600 houses had never imagined that it could face a drought or even a small drinking water shortage because a fresh water reservoir, Vazhani, used to release water through its canals to replenish wells during summer. Today, all these families are reeling under water shortage with most open wells drying up. They have resorted to blasting the rock-bottom of wells with gelatin sticks to search for water. Some have succeeded, but most haven’t. “The problem does not end there. We know that the groundwater level is dropping by a metre a year and this can’t be reversed. So what are they going to do next yearIJ Conduct more blastsIJ Up to which pointIJ” asks Kumar.
As groundwater depletion presented a serious drinking water crisis by mid-March, the Kerala Government banned digging of borewells but relaxation was granted for strictly domestic purposes. In a State like Kerala, where the administrative system is so conniving, even small loopholes lead to big law-breaking. So, the purpose was defeated. With three reservoirs, including the giant Neyyar dam supplying water round the year, State capital Thiruvananthapuram had never known what drinking water shortage was. But they were forced to come face-to-face with the inevitable reality this summer. By mid-April, the Water Resources Department ordered reduction of water supply to the city by 25 per cent but for the common man, the reduction was by about 75 per cent though the elite and the political bosses were not allowed to feel the pinch.
“Wasting water has been made a criminal offence. So has usage of drinking water for construction purposes,” Water Resources Minister Mathew T Thomas said.
Take a walk through Koal — vast expanses of paddy farmlands known for their ability to keep a sea of fresh water over and beneath the soil level round the year — of Thrissur and you will realise how alarmingly Kerala has lost its huge reserves of this most valuable natural resource. The Koal is not a mere field that produces rice but home to millions of species of life forms and a playground of avian guests like cranes, storks, etc that fly in from lands afar during summer. Ornithologist G Gopakumar says that this is a thing of the past now. “I went into Koal a week back and was unable to find even a single stork or a sparrow that should have been there in thousands. Why should they comeIJ” he asks. Koal is no more an ocean of paddy irrigated by trillions of gallons of fresh water but a desert of dried mud-base the crack among which would allow your feet to pass down easily.
Rain Gods did betray Kerala last year. The entire State, except for a few hundred square km of rain-shadow areas which are blessed only by the short second monsoon, used to be rain-rich. However, 2016 saw the total rainfall going into an unimaginable deficit level of 42 per cent. If all weather factors fall in the required and expected manner, the State should receive 3,100 mm of rainfall a year but last year it got only 1,869 mm. The weather forecast for 2016 monsoon was normal with the inevitable plusses or minuses but the southwest monsoon, the main source for water replenishment, brought only 66 per cent showers.
The year 2016 had started with an indicator to what was in store for Kerala with respect to rainfall. When the State was expecting to get 260 mm of rainfall in the winter season, it got only 190 mm.
But the big blow came in the main south-west monsoon and the shorter northeast monsoon. Keralites did not worry much when the south-west monsoon’s touchdown on the coast, its threshold to the Indian sub-continent, was delayed by six days and hit the State on June 7, 2016 because the forecasts were promising. But by July end, when the rains were to peak, the worst fears came real as showers thinned down and gaps between rainy days widened. By September 30, when the first rainy season ended, the shower shortfall was 34 per cent.
However, the Irrigation Department, Water Resources Department, the Water Authority, the hydro-electric power sector and the Agriculture Department hoped that the October-December northeast monsoon might compensate for the deficiency in the first season but that remained a barren hope. The State should get a normal rainfall of 481 mm during the northeast monsoon but not a single area got that much. The shortfall was 64 percent but there were several areas that did not receive even 10 per cent of the expected rainfall. “That is the immediate reason for today’s drought situation but that is not the only reason or the real reason. The real reason relates to management,” says K Pradeep, a former Water Resources Department, official.
The power sector is already in crisis. The State is being forced to purchase over 60 per cent of the required power at rates higher than the tariff fixed for consumers because the storage in own hydel reservoirs is at less than 20 per cent capacity level.
As the atmospheric temperature hovers over the unbearable mark, consumption rises. The average daily power consumption in the ongoing summer is 77 million units and this could go up further if the heat rises in the coming days.
“If the coming monsoon behaves as it had last year, the power sector will be facing an unprecedented crisis,” a senior official of the Kerala State electricity Board said.
Analysing the truant monsoons in Kerala, a senior scientist of the India Meteorological Department said on condition of anonymity said that the State is, perhaps, undergoing slow desertification. Global climatic conditions seem to be affecting Kerala’s weather patterns in an unimaginable way, he adds. The factors influencing the north-eastern monsoon are the temperature over the Pacific, the Madden-Julian oscillation — the largest element of the intra-seasonal variability in the tropical atmosphere — and the Indian Ocean dipole or Indian Nino which is the irregular oscillation of sea-surface temperature over western and eastern parts of Indian Ocean.
“None of these factors was favourable for us in the last season,” he said. But the worst part isn’t that. Though it is yet to be established, the south-west monsoon is finding a new course. There are worries that it is showing a tendency to make the landfall further north — north of Mangalore in Karnataka and south of Goa.
Still, a larger part of the catastrophe Kerala is worried about is mostly man-made. Senseless urbanisation, unscientific housing policies and methods, waste-generating lifestyle, disregard for balance of nature, unintelligent exploitation of natural resources, avaricious mining of all minable materials, the list is long.
“Almost all rivers, lakes, paddy fields and wetlands are victims of this unintelligent and irresponsible human interference,” says environmentalist KV Baby. “River Nila is the best example of this. The riverbed is at least six meters deeper than what it was 40 years ago due to senseless sand-mining. This means that the water-holding capacity is forcing vast areas adjoining the banks to go dry. Though there are scores of such instances in front of us, Governments and development-mongers never stop crying for more. Now they want to destroy the scenic Athirappally waterfall and the Chalakudy river by building a dam to generate an impossible-to-get amount electricity, which would lead to a severe water crisis for about a million human beings and crores of other life forms. We are killing ourselves by killing the nature,” he adds.
Departure from a strictly agrarian economy in the wake of the transition to a money-order economy leading to large-scale reduction of cultivable land area, demands of more roads and buildings, deforestation to satisfy indefinable luxuries, reclamation of wetlands for construction purposes have all contributed to the current water crisis in Kerala.
In the first century of the new millennium the area under cultivation of rice, the staple food of the Keralites, shrank by 34 per cent. In Palakkad, known as Kerala’s Rice Chest, the area under paddy cultivation dropped by 18 per cent in a single year — 2011-12. The shrinkage of total cultivable land in Kerala between 1976 and 2011 was 76 per cent, according to a study. “A hectare of active paddy field can store more than two crore liters of water underneath the soil. I think, Keralites are unable to understand the importance of such a system in this summer. Kill the rivers, kill the forests, kill the rivers, kill, kill, kill… and eventually we ourselves get killed,” says environmentalist K Mohandas.
Similar is the case of wetlands, lakes and forests. Between 2004 and now the total area of wetlands, those marshy wonders that rejuvenate all life forms in critical climatic conditions, in Kerala by 49 per cent. The surface area of the Vembanad lake, the largest inland water system of the State, suffered huge shrinkage. Western Ghats, the mighty mountain ranges that start in southern Kerala and extend several hundred kilometers beyond the northern limits of the State, is its geographical, geological, hydrological and environmental guardian with their rich evergreen canopy, the many rivers and brooks that spring from their bowels. Altogether the Western Ghats have suffered a forest loss cover of more than 35 per cent in the last hundred years. Among the six States that benefit from the presence of the Western Ghats, Kerala has seen the maximum loss of its forest cover — 63 per cent. The profit-hungry business interests still want to go on with the rape of the pristine forests of the Ghats with mining projects and quarry operations. “We refuse to learn,” laments Mohandas.
DRY DAYS
If groundwater level can drop by two-to-four metres in four years, if the process is irreversible considering the truant monsoons and the pace of loss of soil’s absorbing capacity due to construction of concrete and bitumen jungles in the name of development, this is only the beginning.
Also, rocks, from where borewell waters spring, do not absorb water like the soil does. Every drop extracted from such a system is a drop lost forever. Kerala, green land with the swaying canopies of tropical forests and coconut groves, the green cover of jungle undergrowth the sapphire lakes and rivers that fill the land from an aerial view, is fast losing its grandeur as God’s Own Country.
Clean, potable water is already a precious resource in Kerala. How long are we going to depend on packaged drinking water manufactured out of millions of liters of water extracted from borewells dug in places like drought-hit PalakkadIJ
Even if Kerala foolishly decides to depend fully on industry-produced drinking water, where would all that water come fromIJ
Keralites’ total water requirement at the beginning of the millennium was 26,800 million cubic metres. It would rise to nearly 44,000 million cubic metres — or even more — by the close of the third decade of the millennium.
At the current rate of depletion and at the present rate of non-replenishment, where would Kerala draw all that water fromIJ