A year after, Kerala is struggling to keep head above water

Government claims do not hold water in the face of the miserable lives led by the farmers, merchants and other people affected by last year's flood. A year after a devastating deluge sent Kerala's economy into doldrums, people who lost their homes and livelihoods are still lining up in front of government offices to claim the promised compensation.

The farmers in Upper Kuttanad and other agricultural areas laid waste by the downpour and the subsequent flood are sitting on a pile of debt thanks to incomplete or inefficient government support. In some areas, only a tenth of the promised financial support was disbursed to the distressed farmers.

The deluge could not have come at a worse time for the small-scale merchants and retailers, who were hoping to ride the Onam shopping spree. Even the agricultural markets were tuned to the biggest celebration of Kerala.

A year on, both farmers and traders are trying to recoup their losses in the Onam market. They have no other recourse to fund their endeavours. Most of them have to rely on loan sharks. Who is responsible for the anomalies in the restoration and rehabilitation efforts?

Faulty assessment

The persistent woes started with the assessment of losses in the aftermath of the flood. A lack of planning is reflected in the way the government was forced to extend the deadlines for receiving the appeals against the awarding of compensation for those who lost their homes in the flood.

The original deadline was November 20, 2018. It was later extended to December 31. Then the Kerala High Court intervened to extend the deadline to January 31, 2019. As appeals came pouring down, the government extended the deadline one more time to June 30.

The government has received 34,768 appeals on compensation awarded for completely destroyed houses. The officers insist that they had settled all but 493 appeals. When it comes to partly destroyed houses, the administration received 1,02,479 appeals and was yet to clear 601 of them, the officials said.

More than 2,000 appeals regarding totally destroyed houses were accepted by the administration. A total of about 13,000 houses were deemed to be destroyed as per initial estimates. The number rose to 15,324 after the consideration of appeals. The official number of partly destroyed houses rose from 2.1 lakh to 2.5 lakh after the appeals round.

Appeals galore

These figures throw light on a pattern. The original estimation was done without any scientific method. Many deserving cases were left out in the first stage of damage assessment. This casual approach led to a situation in which people were still waiting for compensation even after a year of the tragedy.

These lapses have many reasons, including technical ones. The assessment through a mobile app was far from satisfactory, leading to a rise in decisions that were later challenged. Many of the appeals were heard, while a lot more remained unheard.

Even as the government set a deadline of January 31 to receive appeals, as many as 27,432 appeals were filed after that date in Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha, Ernakulam, Kottayam, Idukki, Thrissur and Wayanad districts. There were complaints that some of the local self-government bodies, responsible for receiving the appeals, had refused to forward the appeals for follow-up action by executive engineers.

The popular anger forced some of the district collectors to warn local bodies of strict action if they were found sitting on the appeals.

Complaints in the dump

We still do not know if the administration has gone through all the appeals it received. In fact, some of the scenes we encountered while investigating for this report suggested otherwise. We found more than 5,000 petitions bundled together in gunny sacks and dumped near a washroom in the district collectorate in Ernakulam.

After Manorama exposed this callous treatment, the authorities opened the sacks and promised to hand them over to the respective local self-government bodies. Even the Kerala High Court took cognisance of the matter.

Officers at the collectorate said that they would summon more than 5,000 petitioners to the local self-government bodies to collect their statements. They added that the petitioners might have to submit the pleas anew because the earlier pleas did not stick to the prescribed format. The process is guaranteed to become more cumbersome for the affected people.

The situation was more pathetic in Pathanamthitta district. As many as 323 appeals from those who lost their houses in the flood have gone missing in Niranam panchayat.

Complaints and appeals are quite natural in the aftermath of a calamity of this magnitude but an administration's efficiency is tested in the way in which it responds to the complaints and resolves them. There is no room for complicity because each petition is a life-and-death matter for the petitioner.

Fake beneficiaries

Kerala was hailed for the way the state responded to the deadly flood in August. The deluge brought out the best of the people who volunteered to bail out the affected. Yet a week later, unscrupulous elements eclipsed that honour.

Thousands of people were found to have forged documents to make away with the immediate solatium offered by the state government to people rendered homeless. About 3,000 people were forced to repay the compensation money of Rs 10,000 each after the government published a district-wise list of people who had availed of the money.

Withering hopes

If people who lost their houses in the flood were still waiting for relief, farmers who lost a season's crop are a distressed lot. In the Upper Kuttanad region, which remained under a sheet of water for more days than any other part of the state, farmers are yet to receive crores of rupees as compensation.

The state government offered Rs 38.09 lakh as compensation for crops ruined by the high water. Only half of this amount has been distributed so far. Though the government had earmarked Rs 1.39 crore to clear the paddy fields of the silt deposited by the raging rivers, as much as Rs 97.54 lakh is yet to be spent for the purpose.

The farmers who collectively spent Rs 25.97 lakh to rebuild the bunds and repair the pump sets have not been reimbursed a single rupee by the government. Though the government had promised financial help to the tune of Rs 12,000 per hectare to resume cultivation, the farmers who cleared the mud deposits, planted seedlings and harvested the crop are yet to receive any money.

The situation was more or less the same across the affected areas in the state. Farmers in Koovappadi in Ernakulam district have received only Rs 10 lakh as government compensation though they have lost crops worth about Rs 98.85 lakh.

In Panamaram in Wayanad, hectares of agricultural land was rendered useless by large-scale sand deposits caused by the flood. Despite frequent requests from the farmers, the revenue department authorities did not clear the silt to help farmers resume cultivation. After waiting for a year, the farmers borrowed money to clear the fields.

As soon as they cleared the sand off the fields, the revenue department claimed the valuable stock for themselves. They carried off the sand piled up on dried land but still would not do anything to clear what remained in the wet fields.

The farmers who borrowed to get the sand off their field could not expect even a fraction of the market price of those sand loads. Worse, they were not even paid their rightful compensation.

No one lends a hand

The flood was particularly harsh on the Pathanamthitta district. Many farmers lost their entire possessions. Yet not even a single agricultural loan was granted to anyone in the district. Nobody has been given a loan for animal husbandry or aquaculture.

The district's commerce and retail sectors were left in tatters too. As many as 1791 commercial establishments were affected by the flood in the district, according to official estimates. As many as 448 small-scale industrial units were thrown off gear too. Not even 10 percent of those who applied for a government-sponsored loan programme have received a favourable decision.

The Ranni taluk bore the maximum brunt, with losses estimated at a whopping Rs 100 crore. Many of the traders have relied on loan sharks to get the ball rolling. They have no one else to turn to. The official Ujjeevanam loan scheme is of no help. People who had borrowed earlier see their dues mounting. Pleas of exempting them from paying interests have remained unheard.

Some of the banks have claimed that they have prepared a list of borrowers whose interest liabilities may be exempted. The lists have been handed over to the government but an official decision on subsidising the loans is yet to come.

Warning signs

The flood had prompted the authorities to prepare a list of vulnerable people living in landslide-prone areas in Kerala. A Geological Survey of India team had mapped the areas from where entire families had to be relocated. As many as 701 families were found to be sitting on potentially unstable ground.

Such a relocation would be unprecedented in India, according to the Disaster Management Authority officials. Of them, 447 families have been allotted alternative land. Only 147 families have expressed their willingness to relocate. The government is waiting for the others to respond. Each family will be given Rs 10 lakh to buy three cents of land and to build a house.

Maximum number of the affected families is in the Idukki district – 438. Palakkad has 80 such families while Pathanamthitta and Thrissur have 32 families each. Wayanad has 58, Malappuram 28, Kannur 21, Kozhikode 3, Ernakulam 7 and Kottayam 2.

(Written by Tony K Jose with inputs from K Jayaprakash Babu, Santosh John Thooval, S V Rajesh, Mintu P Jacob, V R Prathap, M A Anooj, Shinto Joseph and Jikku Varghese Jacob)