Family evicted for Vallarpadam ICTT leads a precarious life in a quick ‘subsiding’ house-OxBig News Network

Families evicted from Moolampilly for the International Container Trans-shipment Terminal at Vallarpadam (ICTT) undertaking staging a candle-light protest on the seventeenth anniversary of the Moolampilly package deal in Kochi on June 4, 2025. Photo : Thulasi Kakkat/The Hindu

Seetha Vidyadaran, 60, has been experiencing a sinking feeling ever since she, alongside along with her household, moved into her newly constructed home of lower than 600 sq. ft. on a four-cent plot by a canal in Thuthiyoor close to Kakkanad in Ernakulam district in 2014.

Her home stays one among simply three homes on the rehabilitation website assigned to 56 households evicted from the Edappally South and North villages for the rail connectivity for the Vallarpadam International Container Trans-shipment Terminal in 2008. One home has tilted, and Ms. Vidyadaran’s home has subsided little by little from the day it was constructed, due to the marshy nature of the rehabilitation website in Vazhakkala village of Thrikkakara municipality.

While households in these two constructions selected to remain on regardless of the danger concerned, the remaining household moved out, contemplating the precarious nature of their home. Now, there may be an apparent tilt to the home, and even the stepping stones to the home are progressively getting subsided. But the household comprising Ms. Vidyadaran’s 70-year-old husband, their two sons and their households, and Mr. Vidyadaran’s differently-abled sister, has no selection however to threat residing within the broken construction.

“Our house has been getting inundated from the very outset, not to mention the reptiles that come with the flood water through the canal. We lost two cattle to snake bites a few years back. The retaining wall of the canal left out our plot alone since it was on the canal’s edge,” rues Ms. Vidyadaran.

The household’s woes are more likely to get aggravated even additional within the wake of the potential filling up of the positioning by one metre to strengthen it. “Then we will be left in a ditch, and our house, already prone to waterlogging, will become a collecting point for water. There is no other alternative but to pull down the existing house and rebuild it,” stated Ms. Vidyadaran.

She stated the household couldn’t afford correct land filling for the reason that ₹75,000 allotted by the authorities was grossly insufficient, contemplating {that a} stable and sturdy filling price round ₹2.50 lakhs again in 2014. “We decided to build the house in the first place out of fear that the ₹6 lakhs we received in compensation while evicted may get exhausted in rent otherwise. We could not afford to pay rent out of our meagre income as authorities stopped giving rent a year after the eviction,” she stated.