Making a splash in Alappuzha's backwaters

"The potential is huge, we can really grow and this growth will transform the lives of the people. But our voices are not heard. I'd like to see the hotel industry take this area seriously, build restaurants and small hotels without ruining the unspoilt beauty of this area. That's what the tourist really likes."


The United Democratic Front candidate in Alappuzha had to shift gears just a little bit here. V. M. Sudheeran was not on firm ground. His election speech last week was in English, not in Malayalam, his audience a gaggle of foreign tourists who have no vote in the country, and the podium a twelve-foot-long houseboat, festooned with colourful banners and flags and the mandatory loudspeaker blaring slogans.

Sudheeran was weaving through the intricate web of inland waterways that make up the breathtaking backwaters of Alappuzha, when he made a campaign stop for the benefit of these tourists. A day later, the tourists were moored to a jetty where the Left Front candidate was scheduled to make an appearance.

The BJP candidate, who is not on the tourist route must have felt very left out as India's election spectacle with all its pageantry became par for the course on the tourists itinerary. That is, if you hired one of Alappuzha's best known tour operator Tomy Pulickattil's 'kettuvalloms' (the big boats).

Interactive campaigning

"A British tourist was here before the elections had even started and when I explained to him how sitting Members of Parliament have to go to every home, and every street and ask the poorest of the poor for a vote, about the way we adapt hit songs to make fun of opponents, our banners and interactive campaigning. he said he and his mates would love to come back and see it firsthand," says Pulickattil, as he scans the horizon for signs of rain.

Growing up by the waterfront, his keen eye picks up on the little things that warn of an incoming storm, as he directs his men to the shore, sheets of blue plastic coming down on the bamboo lattice work that sits like a hutch on the large houseboats. Inside the two-bedroom houseboat with a verandah up front and a kitchen at the back, you can hear the rain as it beats down on the plastic.

Pulickattil's innovative tactic to use the election as a draw for tourists is only his latest move to keep the tourism sector, which fuels the economy of this town, afloat during the off season. This is when, apart from this unseasonal rain, temperatures climb and humidity is at a record high. Like campaigning, everything else in Alappuzha, a bustling town, set amidst the scenic waterfront, is rarely on terra firma.

All Pulickattil's eight houseboats – two, three, four and five bedrooms - are moored at the Nehru Trophy Finishing Point. The rain has driven most people indoors. But the spectacle that unfolds as you skim through the backwaters in Kuttanad is a world in itself, a microcosm of life along the winding tentacles of land where the people of this extended town have made their home.

Expansion plans

There are bedraggled schoolchildren with colourful umbrellas walking single file along the narrow track that passes for a road on the ten foot wide strip that snakes out into the pristine water, women washing their clothes, others rinsing out their cooking utensils, the small 'valloms' (countrycraft) that they use to travel to and fro pulled up against the walls of their homes. There are no roads here, no public transport, no motorcars. There just isn't room.

"If we want to get anywhere we have to use water ferries and they are usually jampacked, not always safe" says Pulickattil, who invented the huge houseboat as we know it today, as he takes over the wheels of one of his two-bedroom 'floating palaces'.

Planning soon to offer his boats for weddings and conferences that can seat 150 people at one go, he has been approached by a major entrepreneur in Dubai to build one of his houseboats. "We are still negotiating the price."

Pulickattil admits that staying on top of things is hard. "I would like to keep the tourists here, rather than have them driven in from Kochi for an overnight stay. It should be a two or three day tour and then out, but the tourism sector even though its the major money-spinner doesn't get any concessions.

"There should be places where the tourists can stay, some five star, some boutique hotels, others still cheaper to suit all budgets. We should introduce the hospitality culture here. We get 600,000 tourists during the peak season but we don't have enough rooms to offer. Each tourist would spends hundreds of thousands of rupees on food, clothes, laundry, handicrafts. There would be so much prosperity, at least 10,000 people would get employment instantly.

"I'd like to see the hotel industry take this area seriously, build restaurants and small hotels without ruining the unspoilt beauty of this area. That's what the tourist really likes. Why should there be hotels in Kochi and not here?" He cautions however that he does not want Alappuzha to go the Kovalam way, where the sleaze factor put off tourists.

"I have been pressuring the government to help the tourism industry, give us more facilities like develop a code of conduct. The real need of the hour at Finishing Point is a large jetty so that tourists don't have to wade through the slush and the mud."

Huge challenge

Everything that has been done here including the new road going up to Finishing Point, has been done by entrepreneurs like Pulickattil.

"The potential is huge, we can really grow and this growth will transform the lives of the people, they will benefit. But our voices are not heard." Neither is the voice of the impoverished residents of the hundreds of isolated islands that dot the backwaters in Kuttanad. In fact, life is a huge challenge here. Unlike the inland towns, homes have no electricity. The authorities say it is virtually impossible to provide power across the huge expanse of water to the inhabitants.

The biggest irony says Pulickattil is that "despite being surrounded by water, there is no drinking water". For now, several ferries lashed together carry water to the homes whenever weather permits.

Sudheeran, two time MP here, has promised residents that he will push the government to follow up on a feasibility study by a Japanese group to provide drinking water. But few believe it will happen anytime soon.

Grinding poverty

Medical facilities too are virtually non-existent, with many of the well-heeled who come here oblivious of the grinding poverty that besets the people who provide the real life colour to the voyeuristic tourist.

Pulickattil says the biggest danger comes from governments who are still caught in a time warp, who smell a cash-rich sector that can be bled for their own purposes. "They've suddenly woken up to its potential. It grew because I adapted the vallom I used to take part in the Nehru Trophy boat race to accommodate families after I read about the Kashmiri houseboats.

"From one boat I now have eight, other people have done the same thing, there are over 150 boats just on this jetty. But what does the government do, it says it is going to set up an Inland water jetty where its boats w