Kumbalanghi – a hitherto little-know island located off Kochi, has been resonating with its ethnic charm across continents ever since it was declared India’s first model-tourism village in 2003.
But life has been much the same for people like Jacob, now aged over 70 years, who has for the past 50 years been installing Chinese fishing nets in the backwaters around the island, using steel poles tied together atop a country boat.
He saw the number of these unique cantilevered nets that abound in Kochi, increase from a mere four in Kumbalanghi to over 100, during these 50 years.
Seated beside the backwaters beneath Kumbalanghi bridge where his boat was berthed, with none but old Malayalam movie songs from his cell phone giving him company, he narrated how indiscriminate dumping of waste during the recent past has taken a heavy toll on the backwaters and the fortunes of fishers. “The backwater here has thus become very shallow and filled with slush, making it tough for fishers in country boats to safely pass through. This has in turn affected tourist inflow,” he says.
Kumbalanghi has even been unable to live up to the expectation of tourists who arrive here to view vast stretches of shrimp farms along with the backwaters that shimmer in bioluminescence (known in local parlance as ‘kavaru’).
It is tough for tourists who flock here to see ‘kavaru’, to get food here after dusk, says S.R. Satheesan, who procured a few kayaks and opened an eatery here after retiring from service as a cook in Fisheries Survey of India. “Of late, the police are telling us to down shutters at 11 p.m. There is also stiff opposition from a section of people to kayaking. The locale would remain dormant sans such tourism activities,” he says.
Innumerable components of the model-tourism village project are yet to be realised, over two decades since its declaration as India’s first such village, says M.P. Sivaduttan, Director of Kerala Homestay and Tourism Society (Kerala-HATS), who was president of Kumbalanghi panchayat when the locale shot to fame.
“The Kumbalanghi-Kandakadavu Road that is flanked by backwaters and canals on either side has become a dumping ground for plastic and other waste. The ‘Oru Nellum, Oru Meenum’ project that would have enabled cultivation of pokkali rice (hence the name nellum) for six months and fishes (hence meenum) for the next six months in 2,000 acres of pokkali farms on either side is yet to begin in right earnest. This project would have brought many more migratory birds here,” he says.
Kerala’s special representative in New Delhi K. V. Thomas – a Kumbalanghi native, during whose tenure as Kerala’s Tourism Minister it was declared a model-tourism village, spoke of how he was inspired by such locales during his visits to rural areas in Madrid and London. “Around 40 homestays and a couple of premium resorts came up in Kumbalanghi after it got the model-tourism tag. What is now needed is a full-fledged awareness campaign to usher in cleanliness and measures to retain the waterbodies here in their pristine form.”
