First Onsite Meeting in India – Part 2

Yercaud

By Rémi de Bercegol

The conference at the small hill station of Yercaud lasted two days:

– After an introduction by the IFP team responsible for organising the event, the group was taken on a morning tour of some of the town’s key tourist attractions. Nicknamed the ‘poor man’s Ooty’, in reference to another popular mountain resort in the region, Yercaud offers a refreshing setting at an altitude of 1,200 metres, attracting domestic tourists from Bangalore, Coimbatore, Chennai or Puducherry looking for an escape from noisy and polluted cities. The town offers a range of typical hill station attractions, including the sale of chocolate, momos, tea and, of course, Yercaud’s signature coffee.

– In the afternoon, the group visited the coffee plantations of Cauvery Peak to understand the role that this economy plays today in the urbanisation of the region. Located in the picturesque mountains of the Shevaroys Hills, the emergence of Yercaud is closely linked to the colonial era of coffee plantations. Once dominated by powerful plantation families and dioceses, these plantations have gradually undergone radical transformations. The crisis in the coffee sector prompted some planters to diversify their activities by turning to tourism, thus generating income from the growing Indian middle class eager for domestic travel.

– The following morning, the group went to meet Dharmalingam (activist and Vice President of Tamil Nadu ST Malayali Peravai, Salem district) to find out more about land issues in Yercaud and the associated inequalities. The tribal population, the majority in Yercaud, benefits very little from the urbanisation of the region and the development of tourism. Exploited in the coffee plantations, this population is seeking to recover the communal land taken over by the coffee plantations. They have gradually succeeded in obtaining rights by mobilising and organising. Employed mainly on coffee plantations, they are now taking on menial tasks in the tourism sector and on building sites.  These indigenous populations are the less visible but essential players in the concrete construction of the city, even though they benefit very little from it.

– In the afternoon, the Urbaltour group visited several plots of land and buildings for sale in Yercaud with Prabhu, a local real estate agent. Pressure on land has led coffee plantations to sell part of their land to property developers, resulting in rapid and often chaotic urbanisation. Builders and developers build first, then eventually seek to regularise their constructions. Until 2016, urban development was haphazard. Later, it became more difficult to build without changing the status of agricultural land to residential. Builders still manage to circumvent the panchayat using political proximity, notably with the all-powerful Town and Country Development Authority department in Chennai, the state capital. This situation makes it possible to bypass the municipal level and facilitates unplanned urbanisation at the local level. These field visits highlighted the pressure on land value, at the heart of Yercaud’s transformation, reflecting the wider challenges of urban development.

The final morning was dedicated to organising the next steps, looking at how to deepen the case studies, which are still unevenly developed, and ensure their complementarity and coherence within the project. Pr Isabelle Sacareau, responsible for the tourism aspect of the project, brought the meeting to a close by praising the work that has already been done, pointing to a promising future.

Thank you to all the members of the team who travelled from the four corners of the globe, from Vietnam to Canada, via Sri Lanka and North India, not forgetting of course France and Belgium. It is at times like this that the collective emulation of research and the stimulation of scientific questions are created.

Thank you very much for the organisers, and in particular the IFP team for welcoming Urbaltour in India!

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