Way down south and ‘below’ everything else in the country is Kuttanad, a paddy-rich watery land shared by the districts of Alappuzha, Kottayam and a little bit of Pathanamthitta in Kerala. With its strange position – lying two to three meters below sea level – Kuttanad is vulnerable to floods every monsoon season, the worst of which happened in 2018. Hundreds of people and animals died, farmlands got destroyed and houses were torn apart in August that year.
Among the many rebuilding measures taken up by the state, was a special package for Kuttanad, prepared by the State Planning Board in consultation with a team from The Netherlands, which, like Kuttanad was a low-lying country and which had implemented an interesting project to save itself from rising water levels.
The ‘Room for River’ project had impressed the state’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan when he took a trip to the Netherlands to study the effect it had. In cue, a Dutch team repaid the visit and studied the rivers of Kerala. Promptly, a ‘Room for Pampa’ project was prepared by the State Planning Board and the first steps of it are now being implemented, with immediate effects already visible amid the rains of 2020.
“It is a very simple concept, not rocket science – basically, give water enough space to flow, so it wouldn’t invade neighbouring residential areas,” says R Ramakumar, State Planning Board member and lead author of the Kuttanad special package report.
Floods are not new to Kuttanad. Even if most other parts of Kerala are spared by the monsoon rains, Kuttanad would always be flooded. The worst one before 2018 was the infamous flood of 1924. It would take another 30 years for a spillway to be cut open in Thottappally, 20 km south of Alappuzha, to drain out the flood water that came with every monsoon, from the river to the sea.
Thottappally spillway / Courtesy - Arayilpdas / Wikimedia Commons / CCA 2.5
“Even after the Thottappally spillway was constructed, there were a few issues – one, of not enough water coming to the spillway from the flood, and two, the spillway was not releasing water up to its full capacity. The problem is that at the sea mouth of the spillway – where the water flows into the sea, the exit point was very narrow – like the top of a bottle. One reason for this is the sand bar that forms there, blocking the flow of water. Every year, the sand bar is removed manually or with machines, but it is not a permanent solution. Another problem is the leading channel of the spillway – from Veeyapuram, where two major rivers Pampa and Achankovil meet – was only 80 to 100 metres wide despite the original design saying it should at least be 368 metres,” says Ramakumar.
The width issue has now been resolved. The channel has been made wider and it is now 393 metres. This has helped water flow out more smoothly during the last few weeks.
There are many other means by which more room can be made for a river to flow. Paul Van Meel, a water engineer from The Netherlands who has been a part of the ‘Room for River’ project in his country and of the Dutch team that visited Kerala to study the flood, spoke in a podcast about the different means of achieving this space.
“We could move the dykes out or strengthen them, deepen the water beds (so the water flows into the depth), remove obstacles that block the river flow, create water storage structures and so on,” Paul said in a podcast called Chayakkada Chats, hosted by Ramakumar.
“We could plan similar means of allowing space for river flow, but we don’t of course have the same resources. However, within the state budget, we could implement certain measures like the widening of the channel and the cleaning of garbage from areas like Pamba, below Sabarimala, from where 75,000 cubic meters of mud and waste have been removed by dredging,” says Ramakumar.
Cleaning Pampa
Cleaning this area had invited criticism from many quarters recently, with accusations of sand mining levelled against the government. Ramakumar says that despite the allegations, the government had instructed officials to carry on with the cleaning work since delaying it could hamper the efforts of creating room in the river.
This is not the first time that Dutch-Kerala similarities were taken into account. In the late 1980s, there was an Indo-Dutch study on water management in Kuttanad. Many of the measures identified to mitigate the water problems of Kuttanad were however not implemented on the ground. Ramakumar says it could be due to the lack of political will or the lack of resources, adding that the suggestions made at the time are inapplicable in present-day Kuttanad, since times and technology have changed drastically.
“But for the special package report, we drew from the 1989 Indo-Dutch study, the 2007 report on Kuttanad by MS Swaminathan and the Indo-Dutch assessment of 2019, along with our own ideas,” says Ramakumar.
The switch from plan to execution has often not materialised or else been delayed all too much, and this too has cost Kuttanad.
In the 1950s the Tranvancore government (that ruled before the first Communist government got elected in 1957) had planned along with the Thottappally spillway, a salt water barrage at Thanneermukkam (the Thanneermukkam bund) and a road connecting Alappuzha and Changanassery (AC road) along with a canal that ran parallel to it.
Thanneermukkam Bund / Courtesy - Ezhuttukari / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
The spillway and the bund got built. The road was constructed by the 1990s but the canal is still not done.
“The idea of the canal was to dump the water that flowed from Upper Kuttanad to the Vembanad lake. That too has now been added to the Kuttanad package we prepared,” Ramakumar says.
Dutch expert Paul also mentions the idea of compartmentalisation, by means of which agricultural areas can be walled into compartments, thereby stopping flood water from entering them. “That might take more time. We have padasekharams (paddy fields) now and the idea is to protect a cluster of these with strong outer bunds that can prevent the flood water from flowing in. Inside the cluster, there will be space for smaller canals to flow and storage of water can happen in the monsoon season too.”
These compartments can also resolve a long standing socio-economic issue between the farmers and the fishermen of Kuttanad. The Thanneermukkam bund, mentioned earlier, prevents saline water in the sea from flowing into the river. The farmers like it closed since saline water could harm their crops while the fishermen want it opened since salt water brings in more breeds of fish. “With the compartmentalisation, no salt water would enter the padasekharams and the Thanneermukkam bund can be opened for the saline water to flow in,” Ramakumar explains.
Most of the ideas included in the study report have been raised by the people of Kuttanad – increasing the width of the channel, removing the sand bars and so on. Officials of the Planning Board have had conversations with the public, leaders and panchayat presidents to implement the package without disturbing people’s lives too much.
All this would of course take time and effort. The Dutch took 15 to 17 years to finish the ‘Room for River’ project that they began planning in 2000, five years after a devastating flood had struck the country. Ramakumar says however that Kerala can implement the package in three to four years, since it is not on a large scale as in The Netherlands. It would take up about Rs 300 crore to Rs 500 crore of the state budget and the state planning board budget, officials estimate.
Watch: How Kuttanad is rebuilding itself after 2018 floods