# Ajayan | Climate change is already tightening its grip on Kerala, with floods striking even amid a 23% rainfall deficit so far this season. Now, the latest Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) draft threatens to push more forest land outside protection. That is a perilous double blow, weakening Kerala’s natural shields even as extreme weather intensifies. After the catastrophic floods of 2018 and 2019, recurring floods and relentless landslides, Kerala can ill afford to gamble with its forests. When nature’s warning bells are ringing louder, dismantling its defences is nothing short of folly.
More than two weeks have passed since the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change released the ESA draft, yet the Kerala Government, headed by VD Satheesan, a longtime votary of environmental protection, has maintained a telling silence. So has the Opposition, seemingly more engrossed in the grand national controversy over whether the Congress should sing Vande Mataram in full or just two stanzas. The only vocal response has come from the Church, which, unfortunately, views the ESA largely through the prism of precious land interests of its ‘faithful’. On an ecological crisis that could reshape Kerala’s future, the silence of those who should be speaking loudest is deafening.
The Church’s opposition to environmental protection was starkly evident when the Madhav Gadgil Committee report came out. Gadgil’s radical idea was to put local communities at the heart of conservation, allowing people themselves, through grassroots local bodies, to decide how their fragile landscapes should be protected. But vested interests, and the Church’s formidable vote-bank politics, prevailed. The price was paid by the late PT Thomas, a rare Congress leader who stood firmly for environmental protection, in the Lok Sabha election soon after. In Kerala, the battle between ecology and electoral arithmetic has been won by the latter.
What is baffling about the latest ESA draft is that, even as Kerala’s environmental crisis deepens, the protected zone is being shrunk rather than strengthened. The Gadgil Committee had proposed an ESA of 1,29,037 sq km, covering roughly 75% of the mountain ranges. That was later slashed by more than half to 59,940 sq km. The latest draft pares it down further to 56,826 sq km. In other words, Kerala’s ecological red zone has contracted by more than 72,000 sq km since the Gadgil proposal. At a time when floods and landslides are becoming the new normal, Kerala is inexplicably redrawing its red lines, rather erasing them.
From the LDF, which ruled Kerala for a decade through the catastrophic floods of 2018 and 2019, there is little room for environmental self-congratulation. Pinarayi Vijayan’s much-touted “Room for River” appears to have become, ironically, room for rivers to flood the State. The tunnel project in Wayanad was another questionable gamble. A district scarred by two major landslides, Kavalappara and Puthumala, has now witnessed a third, at the very mouth of the tunnel where blasting had begun with fanfare. When a landscape repeatedly sends warnings, blasting your way through it is not development; it is defiance that needs to be punished.
Equally disastrous was the unplanned National Highway project which was literally building massive blocks to prevent water flow. The result was the caving in of the highway at several points. And when the disaster came, the LDF Government washed its hands trying to put the blame on the National Highway Authority of India.
For the UDF, barely three months into office, there appears to be little cohesion, and even lesser clarity. Ministers and legislators themselves seem unsure of what the government intends to do, or even what it must do. Much now rests on VD Satheesan. If he lives up to his long-proclaimed environmental credentials and refuses to bend before electoral pressures, there is still hope of a course correction. But given the UDF’s early drift, that hope already looks perilously thin.
Climate change, compounded by the looming threat of a super El Nino, has left Kerala trapped between deluge and drought. Floodplains have been swallowed by construction and landfills, choking the natural pathways of rainwater. Now comes another climate warning: what once fell steadily over several days is increasingly dumped in a matter of hours, overwhelming rivers, drains and cities alike. Kerala is receiving rain at the wrong pace and with devastating force, a pattern climatologists increasingly link to changing climate.
Floods and landslips are no longer aberrations; they are warnings of worse to come. Kerala must abandon outdated notions of development and rethink its trajectory. The Western Ghats, already under relentless pressure, needs protection, not political compromises designed to appease communities and preserve vote banks.
The real test is whether the Government will resist any further dilution of an already weakened ESA. Quarrying and mining demand stricter and greener regulation and relentless enforcement of these norms; construction that destroys fragile ecosystems cannot be passed off as development. Floodplains need to be conserved. Kerala’s future generations deserve a liveable State, not one built upon its own ecological ruins. But, like Kerala’s increasingly unpredictable weather, the political climate too remains uncertain. The question is no longer whether Kerala can afford to protect nature, but whether its Government has the will to do so.