The land looks eerie, with concrete houses with broken doors and windows dotting the deserted 301 Colony. The location is en route to Munnar from Chinnakkanal on the Cement Palam-Bodhimettu route. The 3.5-km-long dirt road is not easily accessible and one has to hitch a ride on a local resident’s two-wheeler to reach the area.
Anuraj E.R., the rider, pointed at a dilapidated building on the roadside and said: “It was an anganwadi once. Now it has stopped functioning due to repeated wild elephant attacks.”
The road takes its twists and turns through pine trees with an array of abandoned houses on either side. In some places, there were tree houses close to concrete buildings built as temporary shelter.
Tusker covers trench
Thankaswami, a resident in Chempakathozukudi, a nearby tribal settlement in 301 Colony, said he had dug a trench near his house to prevent an elephant attack. “But Arikompan covered the trench and destroyed the house.”
It was in 2003 that the government assigned land for five new tribal colonies — 301 Adivasi Colony, Vilakku Adivasi Colony, Panthadikkalam Adivasi Colony, Suryanelli Adivasi Colony, and 80-acre Adivasi Colony. A total of 276 hectares of land was distributed to 559 families.
Tribal promoter K.S. Sujimol said: “My family had arrived at 301 Colony as part of the project. The people did not know that it was an elephant habitat.”
What the report said
The government led by A.K. Antony ignored a damning report submitted by the then Munnar DFO Prakriti Srivastava against rehabilitating people to the area. Anayirankal and surrounding areas are the main wild elephant habitats. If human settlements are allowed in the area, that will destroy elephant paths and block the passage of tuskers, giving rise to human-animal conflicts, she wrote in the report.
“The 301 Colony was a rich elephant habitat. I frequently visited the area then and had witnessed large-scale presence of wild elephants,” says Ms. Srivastava.
Upsurge in tourism in Chinnakkanal is also behind the increasing human-elephant conflict in Chinnakkanal and Santhanpara panchayats. A retired forest department official who worked in Munnar said that after the Neelakurinji bloom in 1994, a large number of tourists began to troop in to the hill station, resulting in the mushrooming of resorts which also blocked the elephant paths.
