WHAT AILS THE NILGIRIS?
By T.G. Jacob
Nilgiris is a unique biosphere in the Western Ghats characterized once upon a time by grasslands at the higher altitudes and shola forests in the ravines. This is no longer the case. The topography changed with colonial interventions. The colonialists made tea and coffee plantations into a highly lucrative business, converted the higher ranges into water guzzling fuel wood areas and built towns. Like Shimla and Manali in the North, or Darjeeling in the East, they built up Ooty in the South. Ooty town is located at the highest point in the Nilgiris, and the town as such is originally a hundred per cent colonial creation. Initially, it was built up because of its weather conditions, which were more akin to the English weather. Still it is so though changes are occurring. The town is surrounded by tea plantations, which has made nearby Coonoor into an international tea auction centre.
It is not that the colonialists invented or discovered the place. For thousands of years before their arrival the ranges were inhabited by some tribal communities with differences among themselves but interacting with each other to mutual benefit. All of them had the same world view regarding Mother Earth. This world view was simple and non-destructive. Mother Earth has given you enough to survive and be happy, and the mother is someone to be loved and cherished and no one should ever injure her life-giving breasts. They were pastorals, hunters and gatherers and agriculturalists. They never starved and developed a glorious culture and art. It was such an environment and society that the colonialists ‘discovered’ and made use of. And their way of making use of any place was utilitarian to the extreme, and though they have left in a formal sense, the main contours of the system put in place by them remain.
The utter marginalization of the original inhabitants occurred during the period of colonialism itself. Land and cheap labour were required for the plantations set up by the Britishers here. Great tracts were cleared for this and in the process the indigenous communities lost lands, forests and swamps used by them in their traditional livelihood activities. Once self-reliant Adivasis were forced to become servile labor. Their ranks were added to by migrants from the plains. They even imported and used Chinese slave labor, those peasant soldiers taken prisoners in the opium wars of the mid 19th century, in the newly opened tea plantations, factories and related construction activity. Moreover, land hungry people also came up from the plains and started settled agriculture. The colonialists encouraged them due to factors of revenue farming. The Adivasis were even further marginalized as a consequence. Even before 1947 the settlers had become the majority population in the entire Nilgiris biosphere. After 1947, the policies of the government like the ‘Grow More Food Campaign’ encouraged migration from the plains. Now the Adivasis are nowhere in the economic and political power structure picture in the entire Nilgiris. They have largely got institutionalized into the status of disposable people. The entire region has become a cash crop area catering to the domestic and global market.
After 1947 the most consequential thing that happened to the Nilgiris was the bifurcation of a homogenous biosphere into three States and three linguistic regions. With the States Reorganization this biosphere was split into three States—Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. Kodagu went to Karnataka, Wayanad went to Kerala, and what is now called the Nilgiris went to Tamil Nadu. With this bifurcation of a unique biosphere the identity of Nilgiris was artificially reduced to what is now known as the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. Of course, this dismemberment was done on the basis of language, and this meant the languages of the settlers who were never rooted in the region. The original inhabitants of the region did not count at all.
Actually the migration of plains peasants did not start with colonialism. When Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan established their kingdom in the Deccan, large numbers of peasants came to the Nilgiris as refugees. They were mainly from the Mysore part of Karnataka, and they are known as Badagas. They by and large settled in the Tamil Nadu part of the Nilgiri biosphere where some of their compatriots had wandered in and settled in earlier times after the Veerashaiva anti-caste Hindu reformist movement faced severe repression in Karnataka during the 12th and 13th centuries. They continued to come at the time of the fall of the Vijaynagar Empire also and the consequent political instability. They are there in Kodagu and Wayanad also where they are known as Gounders. In the Nilgiris part of Tamil Nadu they have become a dominant local community. Tamilians, Kannadigas, Malayalees, Telugus and North Indians are some of the other communities now living here.
The Nilgiri district of Tamil Nadu forms roughly 40% of the total Nilgiris biosphere with the other two parts being in Karnataka and Kerala. All the three regions of this biosphere face a severe agrarian crisis pertaining to cash crops like pepper, tea and coffee. Kodagu and Wayanad especially witnessed a spate of suicides of the primary producers resulting from this crisis. In the Tamil Nadu part the crisis of the cash crops sector is no less severe (e.g. in the tea sector), but as yet suicides are not common probably because there is the cushion of food crops, mainly vegetables (also mainly market dependent), to fall back upon. But this area has now developed a unique crisis of its own.
The manifestations of this crisis are mainly ecological and environmental in nature. As is well known, the Nilgiri district is a prime national and international tourist destination. Its tourism history is over a hundred years old. The British first developed Ooty as a sanatorium and resort for old, sick and disabled British personnel. There are any number of British churches, bungalows and cemeteries in various parts of the district, especially in and around Ooty. Also, there are still many Anglo-Indians in Ooty and Coonoor, who are mainly employed in the railways and hospitality industry. Once the big tea estates were organized by colonial planters the district also became a highly profitable economic region. Deforestation grew by leaps and bounds, grasslands vanished fast and the pastoral communities together with their buffaloes went on dwindling too. Presently the Todas, the most ancient tribe of the Nilgiris, are only a little more than a thousand in total population. Commercial plantations and subsequent waves of migration of peasants from the plains ate up their means of sustenance. They have degenerated into objects of tourist curiosity and are victims of flavored social and cultural anthropological studies by Western scholars.
Post-‘47 Nilgiris saw an explosion of tourism-related activities. Every significant bank and big business house within the country built up its own holiday home and all major business families built summer resorts for their own personal purposes. Hundreds of hotels, small, big, medium and large came up. None of this heightened building up was followed by a complementary expansion of civic amenities like proper roads, waste disposal means or sewage facilities. Thousands of tourists come to a town like Ooty every day during the tourist seasons. Imagine the colossal amount of organic and inorganic waste generated year after year. The place has crossed its carrying capacity in every way. This situation is certainly not an overnight development but has developed over the last several decades.
It is common to see packs of stray dogs running wild in the towns and villages of the district. Towns like Ooty, Coonoor and Kotagiri are especially subject to the depredations of these thousands of semi-wild animals. Children are especial victims of the stray dog menace. Who is actually responsible for this situation? The eco-system is very fragile and should be taxed only to the minimum possible extent. It is the waste produced on such a gigantic scale and its inadequate disposal that is mainly responsible for the proliferation of stray dogs. The number of scavenger birds and animals like crows and rodents has also increased tremendously. The situation is pregnant with serious dangers for public health. If tomorrow an epidemic like some form of plague erupts in the “queen of hill stations” it need not come as a surprise. The situation is getting riper with each passing day for such eventualities. Already incidences of jaundice and typhoid and other such water-borne diseases have spectacularly increased in the last few years.
With every passing year so-called natural calamities are also increasing in scope and frequency. For example, the two principal towns—Coonoor and Ooty—are often cut off from Coimbatore, which is their life-line. Enormous land slips occur with even a few days of rainfall. It is not that the rainfall is extraordinary, but the reality is that the whole land mass is steadily becoming more and more vulnerable. The frequency of heavy and light vehicular traffic on these roads, unscientific construction activity and agricultural practices have become clearly insupportable for the terrain. The famous heritage train service has also virtually collapsed. It collapses very often even without heavy rains. It has clearly outlived its functional role long ago and is maintained only as a tourist attraction. Such tourist attractions at the cost of the eco-system are infantile. The colonialists made the railway using starvation or no wage labour for transporting tea and their sick compatriots by blasting away rocks without any consideration with regard to the extreme fragility of the Ghats. Such a railway line is unsustainable and a strain on the terrain. There is nothing romantic about it.
The district administration is never tired of propagating that the entire Nilgiris district is plastic free. This is, of course, not true. There are strict rules and regulations concerning the use of plastic and the sale of plastic carry bags is banned. But the fact is that businessmen and traders simply violate the rules and regulations. Whenever there is a flood the storm water drains are chockfull of plastic bags. No doubt it is a near impossibility to enforce this ban also because of the large number of floating/tourist population that comes in. The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in tea plantations and for growing vegetables have polluted the soil and water sources, and affect the health of workers, consumers and the native flora and fauna. Exotic tree species plantations on the Upper Nilgiri Plateau to cater first to the fuel demands of the British colonial way of life, tea factories and migrant workers, and then for industrial use in the hills and plains have also affected water conservation in the hills.
Irrational and illegal construction activities and mindless growth of the tourism sector have become an unsustainable burden on the towns. The tourism sector is pointing the accusing finger at the public bodies for not taking appropriate and timely action to maintain and develop the infrastructure facilities, while they themselves are largely responsible for the chaos that has come into being. Corruption is common but it is more common and intense in tourist enclaves because an important hallmark of any tourism dependent area is parasitism and the lure of easy money. Nilgiris, like Kovalam in Kerala, is a clear illustration of a tourism dependent economy and society bursting at the seams. The problem is compounded in the Nilgiris because of the crisis in the tea economy.
In the last several years tea prices had dropped below sustainable levels. As usual the small growers were the worst affected. Several factors contributed to this situation. Large-scale import of tea via Colombo port, which is a free port, and the mixing of inferior quality tea from South East Asia with the superior quality Nilgiris tea certainly depressed the prices of raw tea leaves here. Moreover, this nefarious practice patronised by big exporters had seriously affected the export market too. The rejection of an entire ship load of tea which went from Kochi to Russia in 2002 is an illustration. This was done because of adulteration. Iran also had misgivings about importing tea from here on this count. Let us not forget that Russia and Iran are two of the biggest importers of tea from India.
It was not without any basis that small tea growers’ representatives were repeatedly saying that the small tea growers would have no other option but to commit suicide, if drastic ameliorative measures were not implemented on a war footing. In the neighboring Wayanad district of Kerala the number of farmers’ suicides due to indebtedness during the last five years crossed a thousand. Farmers in Nilgiris bitterly point out that in spite of many promises of fixing a minimum support price for green tea leaves nothing concrete has been done to date. At present because of sustained efforts to improve the tea quality tea growers are being able to get a proper price for their produce. Nevertheless, price fluctuations are a part of the globalization process.
To an extent the degradation of the Nilgiris has been recognized and counter steps are being taken due to the pressures exerted by activists, researchers, concerned citizens, enlightened bureaucrats and the Adivasi people themselves. But much more conscious and sustained effort is required to restore and enhance the natural and social wealth of this unique eco-sphere.
[Written in 2009]