Kuttanad, a weeping beauty

 

Kuttanad near Alleppey in Kerala is a fascinatingly beautiful area. It provides 40% of Kerala’s paddy production and has tremendous tourism potential that includes excellent cuisine. (The visitors are unaware that the water is awfully polluted but anyway they use packaged pure water.)

It is only the second place in the world where large scale cultivation is done below sea level. The Government of India has sanctioned for the all round development of the area a Rs.1840 crores Kuttanad Package conceived by the world famous agricultural scientist Dr. MS Swaminathan who is a native of the place. 

The original area under paddy cultivation in Kuttanad was 55,000 hectares but due to various reasons it is only 37,000 hectares now. It is all part of a continuing tragic story. This year a good crop was ready to be harvested but summer rains came and washed out large areas.

The natural question is why the harvest not done in time. No labor. But this is the 21^st century. Machines do harvesting. Sorry, Kerala does not have such machines. We get them from neighboring states when their harvesting season does not clash with ours like this year. Even when they are available rent has to be paid, there are agent’s fees and finally the local politicians reportedly take their cut for allowing priority in usage.

You can have the best of schemes and all the money needed but there have to be committed people to do the work under committed people who allow them to work. But in Kerala who bothers? If something goes wrong blame the Central Government and hold bandhs. Or let the machines (when bought) go to rot. Some time back the Kerala Police got a few most modern boats to fight smuggling and seaborne terrorism. You can see them tied to the piers. They have not been used. Nobody knows how to.

Before the land limitation laws came in 1970, Kuttanad had families who owned hundreds or even thousands of hectares of land. It was the owner’s responsibility to ensure regular cultivation. People from almost the entire district came for the harvests. But quite often the crops failed. The landowners had to borrow money for the next season. Many a famous Kuttanad family were indebted almost continuously to a particular money lending family.

Now there is an interesting change. The land owners do not directly cultivate any more. They lease the fields on seasonal basis to others, mostly agricultural workers. The rent is collected in advance. If a crop fails the landowner loses nothing. The tears that follow are that of the poor agricultural worker. Some people have formed associations for combined operations, but it is not easy for them to keep fighting the powerful trade unions and the elements.

Kerala Leftists fought the introduction of tractors, mechanization of coir factories, and even the use of computers by the Government. That kind of negative approach has done enough harm to Kerala in many ways. How much hold will they have over the Kuttanad Package? Why blame the Reds alone. There are others also who can make the scheme a mess.

There is something that the users, trade unions and responsible government officials have to be alert about. I understand that the charge for harvesters (as and when available) is per working hour. This leaves a huge potential for corruption. Part of the working time is recorded as “breakdown”. The “ghost money” would be shared. Another method, where the user loses, is spare parts money. The classic one is ‘Go buy a new one, or I can repair if you pay.” I know a couple of such cases..

I am shocked to learn that Kuttanad is earning names like ‘poison bowl’ and ‘drowning granary’ in the media and studies.

We must save this beautiful land.

Also read Kerala: Left with empty granaries written two years ago.

Photos: Wikimedia Commons. Click to enlarge

Chakram: The wheel that turned agricultural fortunes

This photo from Olavipe brings a rush of memories to my mind. In the good old days when paddy cultivation was a way of life, this was the time to sow seeds in our area. The Chakram was the critical equipment to control water levels on which the success of the crop depended.

I request you to read Morning After the Storm - Part 1., the Unison-British Council Prize-winning Short Story which covers the changes in Kerala’s agrarian scene during the last seven decades.

Photo by Rejo. Copyright reserved. Click to enlarge.

Kerala: Left with empty granaries

Why are the thousands of granaries in Kerala lying empty? An explosive crisis has now developed in Kuttanad, one of the two major rice growing areas of Kerala (the other is Palakkad). I explained some of the reasons for this in my post, Un-ploughed lies my land.

The immediate problem is that thousands of hectares of paddy in Kuttanad cannot be harvested in time because of shortage of labor and lack of machines. The heavy summer rains have added to the predicament.

Kerala has been facing difficulty regarding rice, its staple food, for some time now. There is an acute shortage and the prices keep rising. Imports of paddy from states like Andhra Pradesh are tapering off due to various reasons.

Local farmers who valiantly try to cultivate either their own or leased land, are in a miserable situation. Reportedly, this season at least two farmers of Kuttanad have committed suicide because they had invested heavily but could not harvest the crop in time.

Why doesn’t Kerala have essential machinery for successful agriculture? The unions (these are the people who fought against mechanization of coir industry and use of computers in offices!) wouldn’t allow them claiming that they would render agricultural labor jobless. Of course, resourceful farmers could obtain permission to use tractors and harvesting machines by properly petitioning the unions!

The ‘loss of jobs’ argument must be a joke today. According to reports, unions claimed there were 15,000 agricultural workers in the area, but only 300 have so far registered in the Collector’s list of persons available for harvesting.

Now frantic efforts are on to get about 250 harvesting machines! Most Keralites would happily drive a tractor but wouldn’t like to get their feet dirtied in the slime of the paddy fields. So they look elsewhere for jobs.

In the 1950s Lambert Mascarenhas published a lovely novel about Goa – ‘Sorrowing Lies My Land’. That title seems appropriate to today’s Kerala. Tobias, the protagonist in the book, says. “Husbands and sons must roam the world over in search of work so that they can send money home to keep their families alive.”

Even as I write this, unharvested paddy is sprouting to waste in the Kuttanad fields.

Ends.

The photo (copyright reserved) of the granary (ara)in our tharavad is by me. Click on it for larger view.

Also see: Kerala architecture – ‘Ara’ in heritage homes

Chakram

©Thekkanattu Parayil

Chakram has several meanings in Malayalam language. Basically it means a wheel. A man from south Kerala who is aged 60+ might think of Chakram which was a monetary unit in the erstwhile Travancore State (Some memories of WW II, Cochin and the 1940s.). A native of Kuttanad is likely to associate the word with chakram like the one in the photograph, which was part and parcel of life in that rice bowl of Kerala. It was extensively used in the paddy fields to control water level.

Now, a brief note about Kuttanad. It is a practically waterlogged stretch of approximately 110 sq. kilometers. A good portion of this is 60 centimeters to 220 centimeters below sea level. An area known as R Block is called Holland Scheme because water of the Vembanad Lake is held back by wide dykes and rice is actually grown much below sea level.

Chakrams were indispensable to the cultivation before the big pumps came. They are still used sometimes. The one in the photo is possibly the smallest in size. It has only 8 leaves and can be operated by one man using his feet, sitting on the edge of a platform. There were much bigger ones, some with even 48 leaves, if I remember correctly.

The large chakrams were operated by gangs of people. A structure would be erected over the wheel usually with areca trees or bamboos. This would have cross pieces at regular levels for men to sit and move the leaves of the chakram by pressing down with their feet. The gangs took turns to work the wheel.

It was a tough job. The men used to sing at work, to mitigate the burden. To borrow my own words: “They used to have songs for every step of paddy cultivation – for sowing, for harvesting, for threshing, for winnowing and so on. There was a rhythm in the growth of a plant and a tune to the counting of the measures of grain. Those were simpler times when people lived in harmony with nature.” (Morning After the Storm - Part 1.)

Ends.