The footprint of India’s great drought is creeping up on Kerala as well. Although the Western Ghats receive copious rainfall, the northern parts of the State’s highlands are in the grip of water scarcity.
Even natural laterite reservoirs which once used to store enough water for hinterlands for much of the year are running dry. Some of this is due to misinformed attempts to ‘develop’ these table-top bowls.
In some cases, as in the rocky hamlet of Pallam in Kasargod district, the reservoir land has been assigned to private parties, who filled them up with earth to make way for ‘development’.
In some cases, local authorities tried to widen the reservoirs with use of heavy engineering only to see the water body dry up faster. In Madikai, the panchayat used explosives to “develop” five such reservoirs and saw cracks form in the bedrock and the water dissipate.
KASARGOD: Pallam is a rocky hamlet in Kasargod district in northern Kerala. The hamlet gets its name from a naturally formed depression on a hilltop which serves as a reservoir. In Kasargod, it’s called a pallam. Playfully, the local residents of this region call their reservoir a ‘50-cent bowl’.
The natural reservoir was once used to hold rainwater for eight months of the year. Of late, the hamlet in the Kinanur-Karinthalam panchayat has become prone to droughts. Years ago, the government assigned the land, as part of a bigger plot, to private individuals. The new owners have started filling up the pallam with earth to level it.
The people of the area realise that the drought is due to the loss of their 50-cent bowl. For the pallam is crucial for the ecosystem and helps recharge the ground water table. Now, the local people are getting organised to fight the loss of their pallam.
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n nearby Kalichamaram, a bigger reservoir called the Valiyapara pallam is similarly being sent to the grave.
“Revenue officers have no idea about the importance of pallams. They assign land to private individuals without applying their mind,” says OM Balakrishnan, a teacher and activist of Karinthalam. He and fellow residents are pressing the revenue department to annul the assignment of the two reservoirs.
Table-top depressions
Pallams are natural depressions that occur on laterite hillocks. They are commonly found in the midlands of Kasargod and Kannur districts in the State. Locally, they are called by different names. In Kannur, they are called parakulams or rock ponds.
TP Padmanabhan, an environmentalist and director of SEEK, an organisation committed to environmental studies, explains that laterite hills in the North Malabar plateau out at the top, providing ideal conditions for formation of natural depressions.
Pallams are common from Manjeswaram in Kasargod district to the southern limits of Malappuram district. A mid-sized pallam can be as large as an acre.
Laterite surfaces are hard but not granite-hard. “The pores in laterite are filled with bauxite clay, which slows down seepage of rainwater,” says Padmanabhan. So many of these depressions become reservoirs, some storing water for up to eight months or even till the next rains.
Revival backfires
The road to perennial drought, it seems, is paved with good intentions. Somebody got the bright idea that if pallams are reliable reservoirs, wouldn’t bigger pallams be better? So local administrations have been trying to make their pallams bigger by using heavy engineering.
In Madikai, the panchayat invested money and machine power to “develop” five of the 10 big pallams. So explosives and backhoes were used to make the pallams bigger in places such as Kajirapoyil and Karakode. The district administration even built walls around them as ‘protection’.
Alas, nature can lay waste to the best-laid plans of men. The pallams in Madikai store more water, but dry up very fast. A lot of cattle, birds and a variety of flora and fauna that used to thrive in the pallam ecosystem have now been left in the lurch.
Padmanabhan laughs at the ignorance of officials. By using explosives and heavy machinery, they have created cracks in the pallam bed and removed the bauxite clay.
With pores in the laterite thus unclogged, the water had simply percolated down and out.
The district’s groundwater officer Sitaram Bhat agreed that it had all been a mistake. “Pallams should only be desilted,” he said. If the pallam is at the top of a steep hill, rapid seepage would result in a spring downhill and loss of water, he added.
God save the pallams
But with governments bent on ‘saving’ these reservoirs, Padmanabhan says only god can help pallams survive the onslaught of “development”. As proof, he cites the examples of Kannur’s Meenkulam, where there is a Sree Krishna temple, or the Ananthapadmanabhan temple near Kumbla. Untouched by backhoes, they survive and thrive. Similarly, the temple ponds of Meloth Kavu near Bedakam in Kasargod district and the Meenkulam Srikrishna Temple at Olayambadi in Kannur district are home to hundreds of flapshell turtles. Both are perennial ponds.
WATER BUCKETS OF THE WESTERN GHATS