'Climate Change Is The Main Villain'

'Since there is no photo-op, or quick fix solutions, politicians do not want to address climate change. It is very unfashionable.'

"Most climate change related issues have no solutions in one or two or three terms in office. So the politicians do not want to touch it, except come in to manage the rehabilitation," says former Caravan editor Dr Vinod K Jose.

Dr Jose grew up in Wayanad and returned after working in New York and New Delhi for 25 years.

An alumnus of Manipal University, Jamia Milia Islamia and the Columbia Journalism School, he has a master's in communication and a PhD in Sociology of Media. He was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and is currently working on a book on Indian politics.

In an e-mail interview with Rediff.com's Archana Masih, Dr Jose explains what Wayanad has experienced in the last few years and gives insights into the reasons behind the tragedy.

The first of a two-part interview:

This is the latest catastrophe that has occurred in Kerala during the monsoon. Five years ago there was a similar devastation in other parts of Kerala during torrential rainfall.
Both these tragedies occurred during the LDF government's tenure.
What has been Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's attitude and response to environmental concerns and dangers?

In Kerala whoever is in power, you see the society, administration and the government comes forward single-mindedly to carry out relief work. We have seen this over and over again in many tragedies.

From what I can see, the Pinarayi Vijayan government is not any different, and they are coordinating relief work as well as a state government can do.

But the question is not just about how well you respond after a tragedy. The question is also about what you do to mitigate the tragedy if a natural calamity occurs so that the casualties of people and property are far less than what we see.

The second larger question is also are these natural calamities avoidable, and if yes, how?

What has been the sentiment among the people in the aftermath of this tragedy?
How have the local people, the district and state responded to the tragedy?

There's a great deal of coordination between the revenue department, the local administration, the state administration, the disaster management authority, air force and the army.

I don't think there has been any delay in the different wings of the government kicking into action post-tragedy.

The challenge going forward will be to rebuild the two villages. Houses need to be built. Roads and bridges need to be fixed. The school needs work etc.

When we were covering Rahul Gandhi's election in 2019, we learnt that there was no railway station in Wayanad district because of ecological reasons -- could you explain what are some of the reasons that make this region so environmentally fragile?

There's no railway in Wayanad, partly because even under the British, and post-Independence too, the feasibility studies showed it would be unviable.

Plus, even though Wayanad is part of Kerala, geographically it is easier to travel to Mysore or Bangalore. To reach any other district of Kerala, people of Wayanad need to take the ghat road, and climb around 1,000 metres down. Building the railways from the hills to the plains will be outrageously costly. Everyone is used to road transport.

The British who used to grow timber to use in the railway tracks, and the Jewish, Arab, Chinese and European travellers who came to the nearby ports to buy the spices and coffee grown here, all of them, relied on the narrow paths winding down to the planes from the Western Ghats. If not the maritime trade from Kozhikode, Thalassery or Cochin, the goods travelled inland to Mysore and from there to Chennai, Hyderabad or Mumbai.

Railways did not make commercial sense for the terrain of Wayanad. The reason was not ecology.

Ecologist Dr Madhav Gadgil, chairman of the Western Ghats Ecological Expert Panel, has said as reported in The Hindu that this was a man-made disaster and the state government did not adhere to recommendations that would prevent such disasters.
His report when it first came was regarded as very polarising. In your opinion, why was it so?

Gadgil is one of the finest ecologists in India. But he is also a highly misunderstood man in the last ten years, after he produced the Western Ghats Ecology Expert report.

When his report first came, the way everyone went about dramatising the recommendations, people in the Western Ghats feared that they would immediately get evicted from their homes.

When we talk about the Western Ghats, we are talking about 25 crore (250 million) people living in a stretch of 1,500 kilometres. His intention as I understand was to put a stop to new industrial-level constructions and mining activities in areas identified as ecologically sensitive.

Ideally, that shouldn't be a problem for anyone thinking futuristic of their natural habitat. But as soon as the report came, the farmers and the forest dependent communities got really scared. Politicians, as usual tried to ignore it first, but then when they realised they would lose the support of people, took the side of the farmers and the forest dependent communities.

Using the fear and the uncertainty that the report created, the real estate lobby managed to purchase lots of land at cheap rate. Once the dust got settled a bit, in places like Wayanad for instance, the administration passed rules that have restricted the height of buildings etc. So the report had some effect in some places. But I think the reason why the Gadgil Report got such a villainous reputation was because of a bunch of reasons.

First of all, the local people felt that in the one-and-half-year long time that Gadgil took to prepare the Ecology Report, he did not consult the local bodies, the elected representatives, and farmers unions. Therefore, they felt the report ended up as partisan, siding on the side of environmentalism over the livelihood of the people.

Second, Gadgil's report came six years after a historic legislation that was passed in Parliament, the 2006 Forest Rights Act, which gave the Adivasi people and forest dependent castes the right to cultivate in the forest.

The Act was historic since across India, the forest dependent people had no say in the usage of the land of their ancestor. There were numerous agitations on this question of alienated land of Adivasis, one of which happened in Wayanad itself, the Muthanga agitation which led to police firing in 2003.

Besides giving the tribal people the right to cultivate inside the forest, the Forest Act in 2006 had also made it mandatory that any corporation in future planning to mine in forest land must get permission from the local panchayat.

It made it almost impossible for a few politicians and businessmen in the state capitals and the national capital to decide the future of a jungle. Local body self governance was at the centre of this decision making.

Gadgil's report, in the contrary said the forest land should not be used for non-forest purpose, thereby stopping the cultivation rights that the adivasis were given by the Forest Act. Gadgil's assertion was seen by many of these forest dependent communities and the activists as an attack on what they achieved for the first time in India.

History also was on their side, since it was such communities and the local people who stopped many devastating projects in the past. For instance, a few kilometres south of where the current tragedy in Wayanad took place now was the pristine Silent Valley, and in the 1980s, (then prime minister) Indira Gandhi wanted to build a massive hydro power project there.

It was not the environmentalists in the big cities, but the local people, who stopped that project then. So in the classic debate of environmentalism versus livelihood of people, the Gadgil Report did not come across as nuanced and careful as it must have been.

While the content of his report might still have agreeable points for all sides for the interest of ecology, the way it came across as talking down to the people, without adequate consultations, and seemingly diluting the Forest Act, Gadgil became a villain.

Subsequently, he spent many years explaining himself saying he was misunderstood, and his report did not mean the people should get evicted, and it did not mean the spice or coffee farms need to be shut, and the local panchayat could decide at the end on the developmental activities etc. But public opinion somehow was set.

In fact, the other narrative that needs to be read along with the Gadgil report is the man-animal conflict, another affiliated issue connected to both environment and ecology.

Gadgil was of the opinion that the wild animals posing threat to humans must be hunted down, and such huntings should be legalised. Gadgil wants the local panchayats to handle such huntings. Any animal, grown beyond a certain number and is of threat to the people must be culled out, he says.

But the environmental extremists or people living in the cities talking without knowing the nuances, are angry with Gadgil on this. But the local people, or even Gadgil for instance do not say go kill the wild animals in the forest, but if the population of such animals increase so much inside the forest, and they come out frequently, and destroy the livelihood of the people, then the situation is different.

Gadgil says wild animals must be restricted inside the forest and national parks itself.

The forest department and the environmentalists were on one side on this, and both had no stake in either the land, or their livelihood did not come from slogging in the field. They painted the people as villains. So once again, without much delay from the Gadgil Report, this debate became the second issue for people to feel there was an effort to evict them from the Western Ghats.

In the man-animal conflict the villains were the forest department itself. They spearhead large scale industrialisation inside the forest. The teak plantations, not a natural plant to the Western Ghats, for instance gives hundreds of crore rupees annually to the forest department in Kerala.

In Karnataka this revenue is even more. Besides what these teak plantations bring legally to the state exchequer, auctioning of timber is also a good opportunity for corruption.

When the ecosystem inside the forest is destroyed, animals don't get food inside the forest. They don't even have water to drink inside the forest in the summer months, and come out to the villages. Elephants come for fruits for instance, which are plenty in the farmers's fields. So again, the bigger question of what's going on inside the forest, is not asked.

When the forest department must make sure the animals get their food, fruits and water inside the forest, and build proper fencing to demarcate the human areas from the forests, the issue of the man-animal conflict can be brought under control. After all we are talking about the fears of 25 crore people.

On any question of the ecology of the Western Ghats, whether issues arising out of landslides, or the man-animal conflicts, we will need to work in consultation with the multiple stakeholders. Top down policy prescriptions, or judicial orders would be counter productive.

What are some of the man-made reasons behind tragedies such as the current one?

From what we understand so far, the Mundakkai-Chooralmala landslide did not start in those two villages. The landslide started several kilometres inside the forest.

We don't even know if it is technically called a landslide, or something else. But assuming it is a landslide in the common parlance we call it, there are a few possibilities.

Obviously, the tragedy is so huge, since people living near the river bank was quite high. They were poor people, many working in the tea plantation nearby, owned by Harrisons Malayalam, whose owner is Harsh Goenka, the billionaire. I checked his twitter feed today, and he is asking the government to help the people.

Of course, the government must do what it must. But if Goenka adopted these two villages, compensated all who died and rendered homeless, and reconstructed the roads and schools --that's being a good corporate citizen.

His plantation is the lifeline of these two villages. His tea plantations in Mundakkai-Chooralmala could ideally be home for millions of trees.

As far as the reasons, clearly, climate change is the main villain. We are seeing an age of extremes. In Wayanad for instance, this summer was the worst. And this monsoon has been the longest after a long time.

It started raining on June 1st, as the monsoon calendar goes here, and it has been continuously raining since then. In two days before the landslide, the rainfall it seems was over 500 mm.

A city like Delhi get flooded with just one-tenth of that rain. So clearly, there was a problem of scale of the rainfall in Wayanad leading to the landslide.

It must be connected to climate change. Since there is no photo-op, or quick fix solutions, politicians do not want to address climate change. It is very unfashionable. Most climate change related issues have no solutions in one or two or three terms in office. So the politicians do not want to touch it, except come in to manage the rehabilitation.

In deciding why the scale of the tragedy was so high, of course, the constructions that came about in the downstream must also be looked into. But clearly, to find a lasting solution, the inquiry should be truthful.

• Part 2 of the interview: 'Landslides Used To Be Quite Frequent In The Olden Days'

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com