Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

hence are rendered useless. The rainwater that flow down, also get collected in the
challis, which have become perennial water reservoirs, and during summer they become
marshy pools.
The elevated areas, including the ‘waste lands’ mentioned earlier, have been mostly
transformed into housing areas. As we have seen, the housing areas spread so fast that he
parambas and purayidams of an earlier period have been practically destroyed and the
vegetation cover depleted. This means soil does not have enough vegetation cover to
maintain the surface water or the top soil. The loose soil, also created by the digging the
foundations for too many buildings ( Now that the buildings become bigger, the
foundations become deeper and extensive) flow down along with rain water, and are
either deposited in the challis and patams, making them into deposits of mud, or brought
down into the low-lying regions. The low-lying regions are thus raised, and the elevated
regions are lowered, and thus a flattening process is on. We should remember laterite
rocks are brittle and are liable to break and need a forest cover to maintain them. Now
more and more laterite stones are cut for buildings and soils taken from elevated areas
and sold to fill housing plots, the flattening process becomes faster. This is apart from the
artificial raising or lowering of the ground, done by house owners to suit their tastes. The
result is that hillocks and other elevated regions are fast disappearing, and madus are now
flat surfaces.
The destruction of vegetation has been very systematic. Most of the parambas are now
housing plots, and the remaining forest tracts are being denuded, their trees sold as
timber, and other areas are being converted into monoculture gardens. Probably the
University area started this process a long time back by planting acacia trees in the
campus when the area was full of a large number of rare species! A few years ago, there
was an attempt to convert a part of the campus into a cashew plantation, and had to be
dropped after popular resistance. Obviously, the authorities were trying to find money to