NO MORE A GREEN PASTURE: Farmlands at Vellayani have seen better days. - Photo: S. Gopakumar

Thiruvananthapuram: For about 2,000 farmers and their families at Vellayani, there were no celebrations this Onam. Forced to give up cultivation, most of them were struggling for survival. Deprivation has pushed many families to the brink of starvation.

Once known as the rice bowl of South Kerala, the Vellayani farmlands are fallow today. Efforts by the Left Democratic Front Government in 2000 and the United Democratic Front regime in 2004 to resume paddy farming failed to take off despite administrative sanction and allocation of funds.

According to the Vellayani Padasekhara Samiti, the total revenue loss to the farmers over the last 15 years was to the tune of Rs.150 crore. The samiti alleged that repeated attempts to resume farming were torpedoed by vested interests. Samiti convener G. Gopi said many impoverished families had fallen into a debt trap following the failure to take up farming. "Thousands of agricultural labourers have lost their jobs and the dairy sector is a shambles."

Mr. Gopi alleged that officials were hand in glove with land sharks trying to appropriate prime farmland from legal owners. He said the covert move was aimed at reclaiming wetlands for the construction of apartment complexes and tourist resorts. Mr. Gopi said the farmers were being denied their fundamental right to livelihood.

Local farmers who had organised into collective farms, claim that paddy cultivation could be highly profitable. However, local people fear that chemical fertilisers and pesticides used for farming would pollute the lakebed.

They also feel that draining large areas of the lake for cultivation would lead to an acute shortage of drinking water in the Thiruvallam, Kalliyoor, Venganoor, Nemom and Kovalam areas.

In 1992, the Government decided to discourage paddy farming after the Assembly Committee on Environment reported about the enviromental degradation inflicted on the lake. Since then, the farms have remained waterlogged and the fields are being mined for sand to feed the booming construction sector. Large tracts of land on the banks of the lake have been reclaimed for real estate development, housing and farming.

Vellayani is one of the three rain-fed freshwater lakes in Kerala, the other two being Sasthamcotta lake in Kollam and Pookkode lake in Wayanad. The lake, which was spread over 750 hectares in 1926, had shrunk to 650 hectares by 1972. Since then, it has undergone an alarming rate of depletion in area, now covering hardly 450 hectares.

The Kerala Agricultural University, which has 360 acres of land under its control, took to paddy cultivation on its instructional farm but soon gave up the un-remunerative venture after running up a loss. It then resorted to coconut farming but lack of flood control and heavy siltation resulted in disaster.

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