The dark years of the Green Revolution
When India declared its independence in 1947, it faced a colossal challenge: feeding its exploding population. Nehru, then head of the country, declared: "Everything else can wait, but not agriculture". India succeeded in thwarting all the predictions of international experts, who already saw famine looming over the country. It did so by boosting its agriculture with monocultures, pesticides, herbicides, heavy industry and GMOs. Today, it is paying a high price for this period known as the Green Revolution. Soils are infertile, rivers polluted, forests decimated and water tables dried up. The situation is such that, over the past three decades, India has witnessed a wave of suicides among farmers, pushed into increasingly precarious situations.
Kerala, in particular, has borne the brunt of this Green Revolution. Between 1970 and 2011, Endosulfan, a toxic pesticide, was used on a massive scale in the Kasaragod district, particularly on cashew, tea and cotton crops. It is estimated that over 10,000 people were poisoned, before the media revealed the tragedy in the early 2000s. Use of the chemical cocktail led to numerous cases of infertility, disability, malformations and even death. These effects have also been observed in wildlife, which has suffered greatly from aerial spraying of the pesticide. In 2005, Kerala introduced a nationwide ban on the pesticide, and in 2011, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants led to an international ban on the toxic product. Since then, the people of Kerala have been seeking redress from the state, which compensated 5,000 of them in 2017. But the environmental damage will take much longer to fade..
Champion of ecological innovation
Decidedly unlike any other, Kerala has no hesitation in declaring itself the ecological leader of its country, and indeed of the world! The Indian state boasts the world's first airport to be powered 100% by renewable energy. Cochin International Airport, Kerala's largest and India's fourth largest, runs entirely on solar energy, thanks to its own solar farm.
Never short of good ideas, Kerala has set itself a challenge: to become home to India's first carbon-neutral village! In addition to a vast tree-planting program, the village is implementing organic farming, organizing eco-education programs, replacing firewood with gas, and many other measures that promise to boost the local economy. Beyond the health benefits for Meenangadi's 30,000 inhabitants, the idea is also to inspire India's biggest cities, suffocated by their pollution, by showing them concrete solutions for reducingCO2. This awareness is all the more important given that, according to air quality analysis agency IQAir, of the 50 cities with the most polluted air in the world between 2017 and 2022, 39 were Indian.
Between monsoon and drought
Deadly and devastating floods are multiplying in Kerala, and becoming more and more frequent. These climatic disasters, which occur during the monsoons, lead to a cascade of other tragedies, such as landslides, and even, in 2020, an air crash caused by the flooding of the runway, costing the lives of 18 people.
While monsoons are normal seasonal phenomena in India, their duration and intensity have been greatly disrupted by global warming. In addition, deforestation and urbanization mean that the soil is less and less able to absorb this water, leading to flooding throughout the country.
Even so, India is short of water. When the monsoon wanes, drought takes its place. Due to global warming, the phenomenon is occurring earlier and earlier, and is becoming increasingly intense. The lack of water means that crops are increasingly thin. In the spring of 2022, this dangerous situation led India to halt all wheat exports to protect its food security, jeopardizing that of the rest of the world, already deprived of wheat from the Ukraine.
Several reforestation programs are attempting to restore the soil's capacity to absorb water. Here again, the government often works hand-in-hand with citizen initiatives, such as Greenvein, an association that helped plant over 30,000 trees in Kerala in 2014. GreenFriends, for its part, is renewing its one-two punch operations, in cooperation with the Kerala State Forest Department. Every November, this NGO launches a vast planting campaign, called Amrita Vanam, which has already resulted in the planting of hundreds of thousands of trees. While there is still a long way to go to mitigate extreme weather phenomena, the efforts are undeniable.
India and its waste
India, which recently became the world's most populous country, is crumbling under its own waste. Faced with a lack of infrastructure, much of it ends up in open dumps, causing public health problems, and poisoning groundwater through runoff. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has been trying since 2014 to improve the situation, and in particular to organize more efficient waste collection, there's still a long way to go. Too long, obviously, for some Kerala residents, who once again aren't hesitating to mobilize to stem the problem. In 2017, dozens of fishermen spontaneously decided to clean up the oceans. The 800 kg of garbage hauled up each day were used to build recycled plastic roads, a technique used worldwide, in which Kerala is a pioneer. Since the end of the ocean clean-up, Kerala has continued to build recycled plastic roads, known to be more waterproof and resistant, this time by collecting the plastic from local residents.
Mobilizing residents against pollution
When it comes to defending their right to a healthy environment, the people of Kerala are no strangers to solidarity and protest. The case of the Coca-Cola factory in Plachimada, a village in eastern Kerala, is a perfect illustration of this unfailing mobilization. In the early 2000s, villagers noticed that the water in their wells was deteriorating, if not drying up altogether. Not only was public health seriously compromised, but agriculture, on which a large number of the villagers depend for their livelihood, fell by 90% due to the lack of water for irrigation.
It didn't take long for them to make the connection with the Coca-Cola factory, recently built nearby. What started out as a handful of mobilized villagers, mainly Adivasi women, India's aboriginal population, soon grew into a crowd supported by the media, local and international NGOs, academics and environmentalists from all over the world. Under pressure, in 2003 the Coca-Cola plant closed its doors. Yet, two decades later, the inhabitants are still waiting for compensation.
Kerala's national parks
Kerala has 6 national parks. Among them, Eravikulam National Park, founded in 1978, is the oldest. The park is home to the largest population of Nilgiri Thar(Nilgiritragus hylocrius), endemic to South India. Whereas only around 100 of these endangered mountain goats remained at the beginning of the 20th century, today there are more than 3,000, thanks to conservation efforts and the protection afforded by the park.
Further south, Periyar National Park is not a haven for goats, but for Asian elephants and Bengal tigers! In addition to these giants, the park's tropical forests and savannahs are home to plants endemic to Kerala, such as Habenaria periyarensis, a small white orchid.
The Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary covers an impressive 350 km2. This rich ecosystem of lush tropical forests is an integral part of the Unesco-protected Nilgiri Biosphere. A fascinating ecological breeding ground, the sanctuary is home to peacocks, elephants, monkeys, leopards, snakes and even one of India's highest tiger populations!
