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ELOOR
Periyar has suffered silently and so has its people. Is this what comes with unfettered development and industrialization?
The callous and heartless dumping of industrial wastes in Periyar, Eloor Industrial Belt, Kerala has reached its high point finale with the local community facing innumerable health tribulations from the air and water pollution that they are subjected to. A workaround may be nowhere around the corner as their lives and miseries go unheeded by those in power.
The Eloor industrial Belt alone is seat of 137 factories all nonchalantly pouring out their refuse and industrial wastes into the Periyar River. The River is today a Water body of tea- brown waste that is no longer a home to the 500 species of fish that villagers aver they found in it. Sand mining goes on unabated digging deep trenches in her riverbed. The local community once depended on fishing and farming for their survival and livelihood. But today, the effluents make the river unfit for the fishes to thrive and the farmlands have become barren. Agriculture is no longer a possible occupation given the nature of the soil that has been subjected to taking in all the waste and chemicals over these years.
The local people living around this area have innumerable health complaints having had no choice but to drink this water and subsist on the fish catch from the perilous water body that Periyar has become in this part of Kerala. Even the seemingly harmless coconuts and Duck eggs when tested had elements of chemicals like DDT and the others in them. It’s no wonder how even the simple and uneducated person in the industrial neighbourhood can and will identify the chemical with its smell being subjected to it day in and day out. The major canal that flows through the breadth of the area known as the KuzhikandamThodu is now poisonous and murky.
Need we add that all this portends ill for the future of this river that has let millions thrive by its shores from time immemorial, not less for this country that lets ‘them’ rule and lay down faulty systems that are far from sensitive to human issues and environmental matters.
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