We can never return to our homes again, says Neelamma Channapanda Ponnappa

Mysuru: “Our years of toil have been buried in mud and the future looks bleak. With the landslides bringing the hills down, it will take years to rebuild our life in Kodagu as our houses are irreparably damaged and the road connectivity to our villages is lost. We can never return to our homes or villages,” cries a  despairing 53- year- old anganwadi worker,  Neelamma Channapanda Ponnappa, whose husband is a 58- year- old planter  from Kaalur, 8 kms from Madikeri. The major landslides that hit Kaalur buried their 13 acre coffee plantation and their home was among the first  to collapse last Tuesday night.

Neelamma and her husband, Ponnappa C K, are now at the relief centre at the Kodava Samaja, where 900 people, including 500 families from their village and its surroundings are housed, making do with eight toilets.  Recounting their ordeal, Neelamma says, “It was last Tuesday when we had gone out on work that our house first suffered a crack due to the landslide and rain.  We noticed the crack when we reached home at 4.30pm  and quickly entered our house to grab our documents and ran out.

Although we wanted to enter it again to collect a few more essentials, our fellow villagers stopped us and made sure we stayed at a neighbour’s house that night. We did right as that very night our house suffered major damage due to fresh landslides which we noticed Wednesday morning. As several houses in the village were  in a state of collapse, we stayed at our daughter’s house in Kakkabbe Wednesday night. Though people stopped us, we tried returning to our village Thursday to check on our house and got stuck in the floods.  Managing to survive, we stayed at a house in Vidyanagar nearby and on Friday reached the relief centre at the Kodava Samaja.” 

The woman wails that it is hard to  even identify their plantation which is buried under the landslides.” We planted coffee,  bananas, pepper and a few other crops, but they are all destroyed. We  toiled for years, but it’s all wiped out now. Our son , who works in Bengaluru , is married and has four- month- old twins, and our daughter, who  is married and lives in a village  in Kodagu, also has small children. We don’t want to be a burden on our children, and  can’t even do a job at this age,” she adds with despair. 

But Neelamma says she is not alone in her plight as over 500 families have lost their houses in Kaalur, Bevasthooru and Baaribelaku.  “At the relief centre we have been provided mats and blankets to sleep on and food to eat. We were served jolad roti, chapathi and paratha and later coffee and bread. For lunch they have provided us rice, sambar, palya, pickle and even paayasa today. But we cannot stay here for long and nor can we return to our villages. Our houses are in such bad shape that we cannot go back.  Even the road leading to our village is buried under the landslides and  rescuers are having to go through the forests to rescue our fellow villagers.  Having lost everything, our future is bleak. Only the government can help us. But it will take many years before life returns to normal in Kodagu,” she sighs.