On the Tamil Nadu leg of the New Indian Express travelogue, Ram M Sundaram takes a turn in the south and meets up people coping with drought, demonetisation, dangers at sea and devastation.
The last time I visited the Cauvery delta districts was on December 26, 2004, the day of the tsunami. If that day I saw a region left bedraggled by the great wave, what I see now, 12 years later, are signs of the great big dry: parched fields, failed crops, empty reservoirs, and dusty roads.
Nagapattinam is 320 km from Chennai. The State Transport Corporation bus begins half empty but begins to fill up on the outskirts of Kumbakonam, the heart of the Cauvery delta. The giant ritual tank in the city center is still attracting crowds 10 months after the Mahamaham celebrations were over, so there must have been a fair number of holy dippers on the bus. But I also met a number of people made frantic by the drought.
In Thiruvarur, I introduced myself to E Balasubramaniam, a native of Kilvelur village in Nagapattinam, who was going back home after buying spare parts for his bore well. He said it was the first one to be dug in the region since the 1960s. It seemed like a dubious bit of history but it did give me a sense of the scale of this drought.
When the rains didn’t come this November and Karnataka refused to release water from the Cauvery at about the same time, many farmers in this delta region abandoned their samba crop and allowed cattle a free run of their fields. But Balasubramaniam sowed anyway and braved the drought despite a failed bore well, a deeper water table, salinity and so on. There are two weeks to go to harvest and now he is on this bus carrying spare parts for his ailing bore well. His hope for the new year, therefore, was that the government would reward him with a good procurement price this season.
I had heard that Nagapattinam on the eastern edge of the delta has witnessed the most number of farmer deaths in the Cauvery basin this year and so I visited Neermulai village where a farmer, 59-year-old A Arockiasamy, reportedly had died after a crop failure. I found it to be a village of 100 people. While there were still signs of Christmas in the numerous Dalit colonies along the way, Neerumulai was grieving.
When I visited, Arockiasamy’s widow Philomena Mary (49) was in a meeting with a financier who was promising to sell their land for a good rate. Her husband had borrowed from multiple sources to buy seeds and had sown with great hope. To see his crop stunted due to the failed monsoon and lack of irrigation broke his spirit. Philomena was hoping to receive some relief from the government and some help to educate her two children.
I went back to Nagapattinam to catch a bus to Rameshwaram and found a town still derelict from that great wave 12 years ago. Tsunami reconstruction had not yet been completed and though the new harbor at Akkaraipettai, rebuilt with World Bank funding, has decongested the piers, it has not been a game changer for the fishermen. Nevertheless, in both town and country, I saw that people had picked up their lives and were going about living them, buffeted both by water and the lack of it.
Rameshwaram, 320 km to the south, promised the usual pilgrimage arcana but meeting two men made my visit remarkable.
The first person I met while waiting in a long queue at the bus counter in Nagapattinam. Ahead of me in the queue was a short, dark-skinned man in his mid-forties carrying a heavy suitcase. I was awarded the seat beside him for the five-hour journey along the breezy East Coast Road. S Thambisamy was a native of Thangachimadam, a small fishing hamlet 7 km from Rameshwaram town. He had lost his brother S Antony six years ago. He was shot by the Sri Lankan Navy for crossing the maritime border while fishing and died in his brother’s lap. Thambisamy never went out to sea again. His small family was devastated by the tragedy and the surviving brother had to battle great odds to recover.
There was more firing for four years, but 2016 has been a nightmare for Rameshwaram fishermen with unabated firing, arrests, and seizures on the sea. "Every time I hear news of the Sri Lankan Navy attacking our fishermen, I pray for their families,” Thambisamy said.
He got off at Thangachimadam, and I continued my journey into Rameshwaram town. Hotels were booked in advance for Sivaratri eve and I struggled for two hours to find accommodation. That’s how I met the second person who made my journey remarkable.
I saw A Arulanandham, a man of great poise in his late 50s, helping a group of youngsters in finding a bookstore. I asked him to help me find a hotel room close to the place where former Abdul Kalam's memorial is being built. He said he used to be a school teacher, but was now writing a book on his experiences in Sri Lanka, which he called Ceylon, after the Eelam war.
I learnt that he had played a key role in getting fishermen from India and Ceylon to get together for peace talks. He had organised one such meeting just a few days earlier. He said India’s fishermen were losing hope that the government would come to their aid but he himself was optimistic that these efforts would succeed. "We will continue our fight to regain our lost rights till the last breath," he said.
Leaving Arulanandham Sir, I travelled to Alanganallur, a small village 15 km from Madurai that has been the centre of the protests against the ban on Jallikattu, the popular bull-taming sport. The Supreme Court has been standing firm against popular calls to revoke its ban on Jallikattu, but in the village itself where the sport is held with great enthusiasm at Pongal time, the natives seemed quite indifferent to the ban. The people I talked to said they would participate avidly if it was held this year but wouldn’t be agitated if it was not.
To me, this was strange ambivalence, an echo of which I found on the bus back to Madurai. It was but a 20-minute drive but the vehicle broke down and the passengers spent the time discussing demonetisation. I didn’t find great animation in the discussions; it was just something to fill the time.
From Madurai, I decided to go over to textile country Tirupur to see the effects of the cash crunch. When the bus stopped at a dhaba about halfway along, I chatted up a young man on the bus. His name was A Mani, and he was from Melur, a small town north of Madurai. He had failed at studies and got himself a job in a knitting unit in Palladam, Tirupur along with 10 others from his neighborhood years ago.
Mani wasn’t too pleased with the living conditions provided to him by his agent, but it was something he was doing to support his family. He seemed composed as he told me he had not been paid in the last few weeks and things have been difficult.
But Mani considered himself lucky that he still had a job. Demonetisation had hit small and medium industries hard and many daily workers and contract laborers had lost their jobs. Mani didn’t want his parents to panic, so he has not told them about his difficulties. He got by the demonetisation months by borrowing Rs 4,000 from a friend.
He said many textile workers from the Northeast and the North packed their bags and went home because their remittance system to their families has been disrupted by demonetisation. These workers deposit their remittances into the accounts of the few relatives who have bank accounts. But since demonetisation rules demanded documents for such remittances, they had to go back home in person to hand money to dependent parents and spouses.
Hearing us talk, another passenger on the bus joined in. S Ravindran runs a small enterprise in Udayarpalayam, Coimbatore, making spare parts for submersible pumps. He said it has been tough getting job orders and earnings have fallen.