A double whammy for environment

K.A. Martin  
KOCHI,  
The Hindu, July 29, 2015

The State government’s move to amend the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008, to regularise paddy reclamations till 2008 has drawn sharp reactions from water conservation experts, farm scientists, and environmental activists.

While the world is struggling to conserve farmland, Kerala is throwing away even the little it has now, said K. Krishnankutty, former Chittur MLA, a key member on the committee that drafted the Kerala Agricultural Development Policy in 2013.

The draft policy called for incentivising conservation of farmland as it declared “farmlands as precious diamonds”. Mr. Krishnankutty said as per an estimate of the United Nations Organisation, a hectare of paddy land offered economic benefits to the tune of Rs.22 lakh a year in terms of their usefulness in ecological balance, water conservation, and conservation of biodiversity. 

“It was not just an incentive, but an invitation to people to reclaim paddy lands. If this time it was 2008 for regularisation of paddy land reclamations, it would be 2015 next time,” hydrologist A. Achuthan said.

A senior government official said it was a double whammy for environment in Kerala as two water conservation structures, paddy fields and hillocks in the midlands of Kerala, took hit for the same purpose. “The hillocks are great water retainers and they are razed to fill paddy lands, which hold up to five lakh litres of water per hectare at 5 cm of water depth.”

John Peruvanthanam of the Western Ghats Protection Samithy said paddy field reclamations had been most intensive over the last decade. “People are taking advantage of the situation in which there is no databank on waterbodies and paddy lands in the State. Even the fields that were reclaimed yesterday will be regularised by the government,” he said.

An official of the Department of Agriculture said there was no data on which to decide which areas were reclaimed before the cut-off date proposed by the government. The draft list of waterbodies and paddy land in the State had not seen the light of day, he added.

Meanwhile, acreage under paddy crop has shrunk to 1.99 lakh hectares in the State during 2013-14, with Kollam, Ernakulam, Thiruvananthapuram, and Malappuram districts accounting for the sharpest fall.