Vallarpadamport, vallarpadam terminal, Smart city, kochi tourism

MUNNAR

It’s been two years since the World Travel and Tourism Council’s ill-fated shortlisting of Kerala, along with Greece and Mexico, for its Destination of the Year award. The nomination drew widespread civil society criticism, which protested that Kerala was no model of sustainable tourism by any international standard, and that tourism had in fact done very little to ensure “maximum benefit to local communities”, a key criterion for the award. They also highlighted the massive degradation tourism promotion has wrought on Kerala’s highly sensitive ecology. The council finally dropped the nomination, dealing a temporary setback, at least, to the vaulting ambitions of Kerala’s tourism stakeholders.

In the months since, the divide between local communities and the state’s tourism industry seems only to have grown. Powerful lobbies have made rampant encroachments on forest and revenue land, targeting hill stations, backwater regions, coastal areas, wildlife sanctuaries and small land holdings owned by Adivasis and other economically disadvantaged groups. To take the Munnar hill station case alone, encroachment here was as much as two lakh acres, according to government figures. Last week, Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan admitted in the Assembly that last year’s much-hyped eviction drive had retrieved only 15,000 acres in Munnar and 3,000 acres in the rest of the state. The numbers, however, do not tally with those of the state Revenue Ministry, according to which only 4,500 acres have been retrieved in Munnar. The anti-encroachment drive, meanwhile, has died an unmourned death as vested interests managed to influence mainstream parties in both the ruling front and the Opposition.

A major casualty of the damage done to Kerala’s unique backwater region is the Vembanad Lake, the largest in the Alappuzha-Kottayam region, the setting for Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things. According to fisheries and backwaters expert Dr S. Bijoy Nandan, about 65 percent of the lake has fallen victim to reclamation projects. His finding is corroborated by the Kerala Council for Science, Technology and the Environment, which reports that the state has only 23 percent of its backwaters left.

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