Even in a polling station surrounded by a wildlife sanctuary and devoid of mobile signal, long queues were seen at noon.
Voters from 43 nearby villages, unmindful of the punishing heat from a cloudless sky and the lurking herds of elephants, marched through the Melagiri hills in their best clothes to vote.
Kottaiyur, a village inhabited mostly by Irula tribespeople in the Thalli constituency, is surrounded by the Cauvery North Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district, bordering Karnataka.
It has barely any mobile signal, which means the turnout here could be updated to the Election Commission’s system only after the polling officers had deposited the electronic voting machines in the strongrooms on Thursday night.
Revanappa had already voted and was heading back to collect water for daily use from a spring, 2km from his village of Kambala, when The Telegraph buttonholed him.
“Elephants come every other day, mostly in the evening, as they drink from the same spring. Water is scarce in these months and there is no other source. Water lines have been laid but they are dry,” he said.
“I manage to raise one rainfed crop of ragi a year. A lot of it is destroyed by the elephants, who are attracted by the jackfruit trees (common in every home here). They are not easily scared off; we have to live with them.”
Unlike most parts of Tamil Nadu, the buzz around the election here isn’t about welfare schemes, crime or the state’s autonomy, but necessities like water, emergency medical facilities, and land rights.
Even the Asha workers don’t come to Kottaiyur or Kambala, residents say.
“We take our children for vaccination to the health centre in Unichetti (16km downhill). Ambulances can take up to three hours to get here,” Revanappa’s sister Lingamma said.
“Pregnant women are shuffled from one government facility to the next, often ending up at the Government Medical College and Hospital in Krishnagiri (85km away).”
The plight of Revanappa and his kin — the Lingayats, who own more land than the tribespeople — is no better than that of their Irula neighbours.
Since the 1980s, the tribes in Thalli have generally favoured the communists, who consistently win more than a third of the votes here. T. Ramachandran, the outgoing MLA from the CPI, won nearly 63 per cent of the votes in 2021 and again faces the BJP’s Nagesh Kumar C. as his main challenger.
Irula tribesman Sadappa’s main source of income is the kalpasi, or black stone flower lichen, that he collects from the forest, which remains abundant in it for three months after the rains.
Kalpasi sells for ₹1,000 to ₹1,500 a kilo in the stores. Sadappa, 66, only gets ₹100 a kilo. It takes him an entire day to gather about two kilos of kalpasi, risking leopards, the occasional elephant, as well as cobras and vipers — species abundant in these hilly forests.
“No party has fought for better prices for forest produce.... After children finish Class VIII in the village school, they go to the school in Unichetti, for which there are just four buses in a day. The government should ensure more buses,” Sadappa said.
“After the youth finish school, hardly any of them get a job. They go to work in the flower fields or collect forest produce.”
Flowers are a major cash crop in this part of Krishnagiri.
Local voters this newspaper spoke to were unanimous in asserting that no party here helps them get the welfare benefits — such as the women’s monthly grant — that most of Tamil Nadu’s poor seem to access easily.
“About half the women get the ₹1,000 grant every month. The rest of us have visited the taluk office many times but to no avail. Come elections, every party promises us the moon, but you never see them afterwards,” Irula woman Badri said.
In 2003, the government took the then Irula chieftain, Maadhan, on a visit to Delhi where then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee met him.
As he stood outside the polling station in support of the BJP on Thursday, Maadhan still wore the watch presented to him with Vajpayee’s signature. Maadhan is an AIADMK member.
“After I returned, the government built 258 homes for the tribespeople. Since then, we haven’t got anything,” he said.
“If our party is elected, we have promised that land rights to over 5,000 acres will be given to residents, who are mostly from the tribes.”
But the competition with the elephants for water remains an issue.
“Water is scarce for all of us in the forest — humans and elephants,” Maadhan said.
“We humans have a government, who should give us water. The elephants and other animals have always come to the ponds in the summer.”
- Tamil Nadu voted on April 23