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By eight in the morning, the air in Elappully already quivers with heat. The ground glows dull and firm; the ponds have shrunk into cracked clay bowls, and the wells are empty with fluorescent stains. There is no mist here anymore, only dust, rising like smoke from the surrounding paddy fields. “We start work before sunrise,” says Sethumadhavan P, a sixty-four-year-old farmer. “By ten, the earth burns your feet.”
Elappully, a small panchayat on the outskirts of Palakkad town, has always known the sun, but the summers are no longer familiar. Every year, the groundwater drops deeper; the pumps wheeze and spit air. “Once our paddy was green until April,” Sethumadhavan says. “Now we see cracks even when the monsoons are raining heavily elsewhere.”
It is in this rising heat that the Kerala government has chosen to back a liquor and ethanol factory, a project that promises jobs and investment but threatens to finish what little water the land still holds.
For Sethumadhavan, the story began with a promise. A broker visited his family in 2022, promising to build a college in the village. He offered to buy three acres of their land, assuring them it would benefit local children. The price was below the market rate, but the family agreed, thinking it was for a public cause.
Months later, the truth emerged. “We saw our land in the news,” Sethumadhavan says. “It was not for a college. It was for a liquor factory. If the company starts, this place will become a wasteland.”
Across Elappully, many share his sense of betrayal. Brokers with political connections went door to door, buying land in pieces and telling farmers it was for an arts and science college. Several Dalit families, who had tilled these fields for decades without formal titles, were also deceived. “A man came and gave me Rs 50,000,” recalls K S Chandran, who cultivated a one-acre plot his family had worked on for 30 years. “He said he would fix our papers. Later, we learnt the land had been sold. The village office told us it now belonged to a brewery.”
Chandran has filed complaints with the police and the SC/ST department, but nothing has moved. “They told us the land was never ours,” he says quietly. “But we had lived on it all our lives.”
Gram Panchayat president K Revathi Babu says she learnt about the project only through news reports. “When we checked the records, we found that more than seven acres were sold under the name of a college. The brokers lied to the farmers,” she says. “This is not development; this is deceit.”
Palakkad, once Kerala’s granary, is now its thirstiest district. The Central Ground Water Board classifies several of its blocks as critical or semi-critical. Over 10,000 wells have dried up in just five years. In Elappully alone, 2,800 borewells have been drilled for drinking and irrigation, and most of them are already dead. The Korayar river, which flows through the village, is a thin, foul trickle from the Kanjikode industrial belt upstream.
“We spend about Rs 15 lakh every year just to bring drinking water in tankers,” says Revathi. Elappully is currently experiencing a severe drought. Yet the government wants to build a liquor factory here.”
The irony intensifies when considering that the Union Jal Shakti Ministry honoured Elappully with the National Water Award in 2022 for its community-led efforts in water conservation. To raise groundwater levels, village residents desilted ponds, cleaned canals, and built recharge pits. “We worked for years to bring back the water,” Revathi says. “Now they want to hand it over to a private company.”
In the third week of October, Kerala’s State Single Window Clearance Board ordered all departments to expedite approvals for the project. The agriculture department was instructed to expedite permission to convert nearly six acres of paddy land into a rainwater-harvesting pond. The revenue department was asked to grant a land-ceiling exemption, and the Palakkad district collector was instructed to coordinate with the panchayat to resolve what officials referred to as “administrative hurdles”.
The panchayat has refused to issue the building permit, citing a Kerala High Court interim order that bars construction until four public interest litigations are settled. “They are trying to bypass us,” Revathi says. “The same government that talks about decentralisation is treating local bodies as obstacles.”
Officials argue that the project will create jobs and support India’s ethanol blending programme. The excise department insists that the factory will use only harvested rainwater and not tap groundwater. However, local scientists dispute the claim, calling it impossible. “Rainwater harvesting cannot sustain such a large industry,” says Lakshmi R. Chandran, an academic with NSS College, Nemmara. “Groundwater exploitation here has already reached 98 per cent. The aquifers are almost empty.”
The people of Palakkad have seen what happens when industries thirst for water. Only 20 kilometres separate Plachimada from Elappully, where villagers engaged in a protracted struggle two decades ago to close a Coca-Cola plant that had depleted aquifers and contaminated wells. The factory was eventually forced to close after a massive grassroots agitation led by Adivasi women.
“The government has forgotten Plachimada,” says Chandran, who also works as an environmental scientist in the district. “Back then, it was a multinational. Now it’s a domestic company. The damage will be the same.”
The fear is not only about depletion but also about contamination. The Korayar River runs just behind the proposed site, and residents are concerned about potential leakage or chemical discharge. “Any spill will destroy the last clean water we have,” says Chandran.
The project’s approvals reveal a web of contradictions. It requires the conversion of notified paddy land and wetland protected under the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act. The company argues that it needs to build a rainwater reservoir, calling it a “public purpose”. Environmentalists call this greenwashing. “Paddy fields themselves are water-harvesting systems,” says Sridhar Radhakrishnan, a well-known environmental activist. “Destroying them to build a pond for an alcohol plant is not conservation; it is destruction disguised as development.”
Former tehsildar (revenue official) G Motilal says the land deals appear to violate Kerala’s Land Reforms Act. “No company can buy land in the name of individuals. That makes it a benami transaction,” he explains. The land in question comprises nearly six acres of wetland, as listed in the official data bank. The revenue divisional officer had rejected an earlier application to reclassify it, but the company has reapplied.
Palakkad’s water has long been prey to industries. In the early 2000s, the PepsiCo bottling plant at Kanjikode consumed almost half of the local groundwater. Later, a legislative committee discovered that the plant had exceeded its quota and recommended a drastic reduction in its extraction. The factory closed in 2020 due to a water shortage.
“When that plant shut down, the wells began to recover,” recalls farmer Manoj V, whose land lies near the new project site. “Now they are bringing another. When water becomes profit, farmers like us lose.”
The political implications are extensive. The state’s new ethanol policy and revised liquor regulations promote private distilleries while claiming to support green fuel and rural employment. Opposition parties allege that the rules are being bent to favour a specific company. “There are serious irregularities,” says Opposition Leader V D Satheesan. “Converting fertile paddy fields for a liquor-linked industry is unacceptable. This is corruption disguised as policy.”
The company’s past only deepens mistrust. The company’s owners have faced farmer protests in Punjab regarding groundwater use, and enforcement agencies have investigated the company’s involvement in excise-related corruption cases. “If they can drain rivers in Punjab, what will they do to our dry land?” asks Sivan Mannukad, a local protest leader.
The Kerala High Court has stayed all permissions until the pending cases are decided. Yet officials continue to press ahead with coordination meetings and new applications for power and access roads. Police vehicles are frequently seen near the site, although the panchayat has never requested protection.
“They talk about 150 jobs,” says Revathi. “But we will lose our wells, our paddy, and our dignity. What kind of job can replace water?”
The name appears clearly only in the government’s files: Oasis Commercial Private Limited, a Delhi-based liquor manufacturer with a long history in the alcoholic beverages industry. Its project now divides Palakkad between those who see opportunity and those who see ruin.
As the heat deepens each day, the people of Elappully wait for rain, for justice, or perhaps for both. “We are not against progress,” says Sethumadhavan, wiping sweat from his face. “But when progress comes as a liquor plant that drinks our last drops of water, it is not development. It is a drought in disguise.''