Notified, inaugurated, and still not finished: the sanctuary held by an intention

Most pages about a protected area can open with a sentence like "declared a sanctuary in such-and-such a year" and move straight on to the wildlife. Malabar cannot, and the reason turns out to be the most genuinely interesting thing about it.

Two sections of one Act

Kerala did not declare this sanctuary under section 26A of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, the provision that produces a final, constituted sanctuary. It notified it under section 18(1) — the declaration of intention.

That is not a technicality with no consequences. Section 18(1) starts a statutory process. A Collector is appointed to inquire into and determine the existence, nature and extent of any person’s rights in or over the land. Claims must be preferred within a stated period. Only when every claim has been disposed of can the state issue the notification that finally constitutes the sanctuary. Until then the area is a proposed sanctuary held in a legal waiting room.

The 2009 proposal states the reason without embarrassment: rights over the reserve forests and vested forests were yet to be settled, and the Government therefore decided to notify under sub-section (1) of section 18. That is the standard Kerala pattern wherever a protected area is assembled out of vested forest — land that came to the state through private-forest vesting legislation, and over which private claims are common, contested and slow.

We searched specifically for a subsequent section 26A notification and found none. That is a negative finding rather than proof, and we say so. But it is consistent with everything else about how the place is run.

What follows from it

Almost everything a visitor notices. There is no wildlife division of its own and no Wildlife Warden: Malabar is administered as territorial forest, from the Peruvannamuzhi Range of the Kozhikode Forest Division, and the trek permit is signed by a Section Forest Officer. There is no Kakkayam range office in any source we could reach — Kakkayam is a section, a beat. Visitor management and eco-restoration run through Vana Samrakshana Samithis, community forest-protection committees at Peruvannamuzhi and Kakkayam, rather than through departmental staff.

And there is no way in. No gate, no ticket counter, no permit desk, no visitor centre, no interpretation centre, no safari, no game drive, no hide. No permit exists that would allow independent entry. What exists are two escorted products at the western fringe, sold by two different agencies for two different things, and both of them stop at the edge.

The dates everybody collapses

The founding year is printed as 2010 in reference works and a thousand copies of them. The sequence is actually this. On 5 June 2009 the sanctuary was notified — the Forest Department’s own sanctuary table gives 2009. On 26 March 2010 the press was still describing it as a proposed sanctuary, reporting that the Chief Conservator of Forests for the Northern Region had prepared a management plan and submitted it to the Chief Wildlife Warden for approval: nine months after notification, still waiting for a signature. On 8 August 2010 came the public inauguration, with the Forest Minister of the day, the local MLA presiding and a website launched by the Industries Minister.

It is that inauguration, not the notification, that produced the 2010 date. And it is worth noticing that the sanctuary was inaugurated with a ceremony and a website nine months before anyone had approved a plan for managing it.

What was left out

The sanctuary was assembled from the Kakkayam and Pannikottoor reserve forests, the vested forests of Karampara Mala, Olathukki Malavaram, Sankaran Puzha and Attikode, and — deliberately — the waterspread of the Kakkayam reservoir. It runs to 74.215 square kilometres, or 7,421.5015 hectares, a six-significant-figure number that appears both in the 2009 proposal and, rounded, in the Forest Department’s own table.

Of an original Pannikottoor block of about 2,200 hectares, roughly 400 were excluded. About 115 hectares were earmarked for a tiger safari park. About 94 were leased to the Indian Institute of Spices Research.

A sanctuary drawn around a spice research station and a proposed safari park is a sanctuary drawn through a working landscape, not around a wilderness — and that single fact does more honest work than any quantity of pristine-Western-Ghats copy. The case for protecting it was never that it was large or untouched. The 2009 proposal puts it plainly: this is the only evergreen patch left in Kozhikode district, and it had already been cut into pieces by hydroelectric development, plantations and settlement.

One last caution for anyone who tries to check the boundary on a map. The single OpenStreetMap polygon for this sanctuary encloses about 52 square kilometres against the notified 74.215, and it excludes the reservoir, the dam and Urakkuzhi Falls entirely. It appears to trace only the eastern core block along the Wayanad district line. Do not publish an area or a boundary from it, and do not use it to work out whether a given spot is inside.