The Western Ghats Were Settled Before They Were Mapped. That Is Why Kerala's ESA Keeps Shrinking.

Lines on the Ghats: Kerala Has Been Here Before This is not the

first time a line drawn across Kerala's Western Ghats has decided where people may live and farm. It is at least the second and the first one explains why the second keeps failing.

The First Line and the Migration It Caused In the

early twentieth century, Central Travancore faced a land crisis. Its population was rising fast and much of the land that could be cultivated was locked away, in European-owned plantations on one side and government reserve forests on the other.

The farmers pushed out by those boundaries went uphill and northward. The movement began in 1928, when a first batch of about 20 families settled in Malabar. It sped up during the wartime food scarcity of 1942-44, when about 12,000 smallholders left Travancore for the forests of Malabar.

Others moved into the high ranges, to places such as Kattappana, Kumily and Peerumedu. They cleared forest for tapioca, pepper, rubber and cardamom. By 1971, Malabar's Christian population, mostly from this migration, had grown to 442,510 from 31,191 in 1931.

In other words, much of the human geography of Kerala's Ghats was created by an earlier act of drawing boundaries.

The Second Line, Drawn From Above

The eco-sensitive maps are the second line and they were drawn from ecological data, not from land records. The Kasturirangan Committee proposed 13,108 sq km across 123 villages in 2013 and protests followed. After a further study, the Centre's draft fell to 9,993.7 sq km.

Kerala now wants 8,590.69 sq km, forest only, across 98 villages. The gap between Kasturirangan's figure and Kerala's is 4,517.31 sq km. That land is not empty wilderness. Much of it is homesteads, cardamom estates and rubber holdings built up over three generations.

A photograph in The Hindu of Koottickal village in Kottayam, which the draft includes, shows the problem: a settled landscape that sits inside an ecological boundary.

Where the Parallel Breaks

The two lines differ in one important way. The first line, reserve forests and plantations, pushed people into the forest and the state treated clearing land for food as productive. The second line tries to keep people out of new activity in the forest, because the state now values the forest as an ecological asset.

The settlers are no longer landless migrants. They hold titles, vote and are represented by a government pressing their case in Delhi.

For the exam: the ESA deadlock is a GS1 human-geography question as much as a GS3 environment question. Kerala's slopes were humanised by migration before they were mapped for conservation and a boundary that ignores that history will keep being redrawn.