KASARGOD: "Each file has a throbbing life behind it." That was Pinarayi Vijayan's words of advice to officials on his first visit to the Secretariat as the chief minister in June 2016. He has repeated them several times in the past two years to drive home the message that officials should not sit on files. Last Sunday, the chief minister said that again after an 81-year-old man, running around to make his ration card BPL, threatened to end his life in Aluva.
But the bureaucracy's binding knot of the red tape is almost impossible to untie.
The lives of Chathunair, 94, and wife Narayani A, 80, of Karaduka panchayat, are ebbing away in one such file somewhere in the Secretariat. Five years ago, the Forest Department agreed to buy their isolated house and 74 cents deep inside Karaduka forest at Chettoni because of frequent elephant attacks.
"I gave the formal application for our rehabilitation to the forest department on March 13, 2013," says Narayani, who owns the property. After four years in 2017, the Revenue Divisional Officer and the Agriculture Officer valued the property and crops at a little over `19 lakh.
The RDO sent the valuation letter to the North Zone Chief Forest Conservator for further action on April 19, 2017.
“And that is the last we have heard from them,” said Chathunair, who is battling cancer. A source says the file had reached the Secretariat. But the family could not wait until the government gives them the money. “Every summer is a nightmare,” says Jayashree A N K, 39, the aged couple’s youngest daughter-in-law, who is living with them, with her children aged nine and six.
In 2017, the couple moved out of the forest to a small house at Shantinagar in Karaduka panchayat. The house owner, Thamban Nair, takes only Rs 1,500 and does not bother them even if they miss paying the rent. “I don’t know how long we should live in penury before the money arrives,” says Narayani. Jayashree’s husband and the couple’s youngest son Ratnakaran, 44, have now gone to Dubai in search of a job on a visiting visa. The couple’s other three children are living in shanties.
Chathunair, who does not know about his illness but knows he is dying, says: “All I want is a small plot of my own, where I can be cremated. I don’t want to end up in the public crematorium.” In the 65 years he lived inside the forest, he grew 350 acrecanut trees, scores of coconut trees and hundreds of plantain on his 74 acres. “Elephants would cross the Payaswini river every summer and destroy the crops,” says Chathunair.
Jayashree — who is originally from Chembarika, a semi-urban locality — was in a for a shocker when she came to Chettoni after marrying Chathunair’s son in 2006. “The first thing that struck me was there were no neighbours,” she said. Today, the nearest house was 20 minutes walk away after crossing a stream and ducking the solar fence. She says the elephant menace started in 2008. “They used to come in a herd of six to eight, including their calves, and dangerously lurk in our backyard,” she says.
The family scares away the elephants away by throwing fireballs made of old clothes dipped in kerosene. “And forest officials also used to come to our rescue even when we call them at midnight,” she says.
But in 2013, elephants destroyed 400 arecanut trees of the neighbouring plantation and then wreaked havoc in Chathunair’s property. “That was the year, forest officials asked us to sell our property to the department and find a safer place to live,” says Narayani.