The year the wells stopped holding water

Most environmental change is reported as a trend. At Rosemala the residents give it a date.

A valley that had never been short of water

This is high Ghats country, and the water arrangement here used to be reliable in a way that lowland Kerala is not. Marshes at higher altitudes, forest and grassland held the rain and let it out slowly all year. Rosemala, Scroll.in reported in 2016, "is in an area that had never seen water shortages in the past century".

Satyanandan and Pankajakshy — 93 and 76 when they were interviewed — had come to these hills thirty-six years earlier. Between them they had watched most of that century of reliability.

1992

Satyanandan dated the change to a single flood. "After the floods," he said, "water from even newly dug wells just vanishes overnight."

That is an unusually precise piece of testimony, and the mechanism he described is plausible on its face. The landslips that came with the flood brought down mud and sand, choking the Kallada river as it sought a new course through the rainy season. Trees were uprooted and forest destroyed in the process.

Change the shape of a valley's drainage and you change where its groundwater sits. A well that held water for decades stops holding it, and a new well dug beside it does no better, because the problem is not the well.

What it looked like by 2016

In the summer of that year one man in Rosemala still had water. "Rasaq, who owns a teashop in Rosemala, is the only person there whose well hasn't dried up." His own estimate of what was coming: "In another week, about 200 families will be without water, if it doesn't rain."

Two hundred families is most of the valley.

The residents also describe a second change alongside the water, and it is the sort of detail that only comes from people who have stood in the same place for decades. "Once, even summer mornings brought fog to this area. Now mist is rare and water is scarce." The afternoon rain that used to break the summer heat is, in their account, simply missing.

And what it did to the farming

The crops followed the water. Traditional planting here — cloves, Chinese potato — had become difficult. Many households shifted to rubber, which tolerates the changed conditions better, and were still waiting to see any yield.

Anything else runs into the other constraint of farming inside a wildlife sanctuary: elephants and other animals from the forest are a standing threat to any crop worth raiding. So the choice narrows to a tree crop that pays nothing for years, in a valley where the land cannot be sold.

The irony downstream

Rosemala sits in the catchment of the irrigation reservoir below it. The rain that falls on this valley is part of what fills a store built to water two districts. The dam, its wall and its power station are a separate place with a separate story and we keep them there — but the geography is worth holding for a moment. Water shortage in the catchment of a water supply is not a contradiction; it is what happens when the ground stops holding water and starts merely passing it through.

Why we are telling you this on a trek page

Because it is the most specific thing anyone has recorded about this valley, and because it changes what you are looking at from the lookout. The view from the Rosemala watchtower is usually written up as scenery — forest, ridges, the reservoir spread out below. It is also a catchment that has been measurably changing for thirty years, described by the people who live in it in terms of wells, fog and the month the afternoon rain stopped coming.

And it is a reason to carry your own water up the road. There is a tea shop at the counter, and the man who ran a tea shop here in 2016 was the last person in the valley with a well that held.

What we are not claiming

This is testimony, not a hydrological study. Nobody has published well-level records for Rosemala, nobody has instrumented the fog, and we have found no scientific paper attributing the valley's groundwater loss to the 1992 landslips. What exists is a reported piece in which several named residents, one of them ninety-three, independently describe the same change and date it to the same event.

That is worth more than it might sound. Long-resident testimony is how most environmental change in the Ghats gets noticed at all, years before anyone measures it — and it is far more specific than the "climate change is affecting the Western Ghats" sentence that would otherwise fill this space. We are reporting what the people who live there say, with their names attached and the date of the interview, and we are not dressing it up as anything else.