Kerala’s sorrow

Kerala’s sorrow

State’s plight is a warning to prepare for natural calamities and review vulnerabilities.

Kerala is staring at its worst flooding in living memory. With incessant rainfall for two weeks and coming on the heels of surplus monsoons since June, all rivers went into spate forcing open the sluice gates of 34 dams. To put the flooding in context, surplus deviation from rainfall normal has been 42% since June 1, 255% between August 9 and 15, and on August 17, the departure from normal was a whopping 424%. The deluge has invited comparisons with the Great Kerala Floods of 1924. But the damage this time is magnified manifold by ruination of infrastructure built painstakingly over decades.

Roads and bridges have been washed away and thousands of houses, commercial establishments, government offices and farms submerged in floodwaters. Over 7 lakh people were shifted to 3,500 relief camps. Kerala government’s preliminary assessment of losses is pegged at Rs 19,000 crore. With the state government and local volunteers overwhelmed at many places and people cut off for days, the scale of the disaster, in hindsight, tells us that greater central and armed forces intervention was needed right at the start.

A disaster of this magnitude requires generous contributions. Centre has offered Rs 600 crore as interim disaster relief and state governments and ordinary citizens are also contributing. With 11 of Kerala’s 14 districts affected, and five – Ernakulam, Pathanamthitta, Thrissur, Idukki and Alappuzha – severely, the rebuilding efforts will set the perpetually revenue deficit state back by a few years. Rebuilding could also be a time for Kerala to identify mistakes in its development trajectory. The 2013 Uttarakhand floods exposed careless construction activity on hills without heeding ecology and topography. The 2014 Srinagar and 2015 Chennai floods revealed chaotic urban development that constricted wetlands and riverbeds and choked river flows.

Kerala resembles a continuous stretch of urban habitations owing to high population density and construction right up to waterfronts. Encroachment into Western Ghats and conversion of paddy fields have continued unabated owing to scarcity of land and economic reasons. After these floods and last year’s Cyclone Ockhi, Kerala must pay closer attention to long and short term rain forecasts, disaster relief training, dam management practices, and floodplain and Western Ghats zoning. Some green measures are certain to meet popular resistance. But the possibility of recurrent floods amid climate change is now a reality that coastal and hill states can no longer ignore.