The worst natural calamity the country has ever seen took place in Mepadi panchayat of Wayanad district, Kerala. The Central Committee of Trade Union Centre of India (TUCI) demands that this is a man-made disaster that has wiped out villages like Punchirimattam, Mundakkai, Attamala and Chooralmala and declare it, a national disaster.
Rehabilitation should be ensured by providing at least one hectare of agricultural land and habitable housing to the common people including plantation workers who survived the disaster to lead a normal life.
In the event of landslide, the entire population should be permanently relocated from areas prone to landslides by finding urgently needed land and providing shelter and basic facilities.
The Kerala government should announce that it will completely abandon the proposed tunnel project that will destroy the lives of people in Wayanad, Kozhikode and Malappuram districts in the wake of frequent disasters like Mundakkai in 1984, Puthumala and Kavalapara in 2019, Mundakai and Chooralmala in 2024.
Shut down all quarries operating in this ecologically red zone area and stop all construction activities. Shut down all operational and under construction resorts. We also demand an immediate stop to land conversions and illegal transfers being carried out by realestate-tourism-land mafias in Chooralmalai and neighboring areas by flouting laws regulating land usages.
However, the ruling regimes in the State and at the Centre, hand in glove with greedy corporates and real-estate mafia, have become facilitators of plunder of nature and forests driving the tribal people and the toiling and oppressed living in these areas to devastation and destruction. Almost 13 years ago, the Gadgil Report, in spite of its limitations such as neglect of socio-economic factors pertaining to State, pointed out the impending catastrophe, all the ruling class party coalitions led by CPI (M), Congress and BJP along with the leadership of Catholic Church in Kerala, who are in the forefront of Western Ghats encroachment, were attacking the Report and even unitedly conducted a Bandh against it. And regarding the flourishing plunder of nature, the corporate mafia and the ruling regime are still moving in tandem. As a result, since the formation of Kerala State in 1956 alone, forestland in Wayanad District has been reduced by more than half.
In this horrific situation, and in the context of intensifying global climate crisis, the only alternative is a reversal of the ongoing neoliberal-corporatisation whose main essence today is outright plunder of nature. It is upto the people and all democratic forces to rise up and reverse this pro-corporate trend with a pro-people, pro-nature and pro-women development paradigm, which is the only alternative today.
R. Manasayya
General Secretary
Trade Union Centre of India (TUCI)
MOB: 9880930683
www.tuci.in
New Delhi
4thย Augustย 2024
