The State government has sanctioned ₹73.61 crore for rehabilitation of people living inside forests and for fencing the forest periphery to counter man-animal conflicts.
The project will be implemented by the Forest and Wildlife Department in association with the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB).
The funds include ₹21 crore that will be used for construction of fences along 42 km of forest periphery across the State using crash guard steel rope.
The money would be allotted as per the reports of divisional forest officers, a government order said.
As a pilot project, the crash guard steel rope fencing was introduced on the 1.2-km stretch near Anakkulam in the Mankulam forest division recently. The work was completed from Anakkulam to Valiyaparakudy last year under the supervision of B.N. Nagaraj, former Mankulam DFO, at a cost of ₹50 lakh.
It was found efficient and cost-effective as per a study by IIT, Palakkad, which recommended it for other forest areas too.
Crash guard steel
The introduction of crash guard steel fencing would effectively withstand such animal attacks, experts hoped.
The already in-place solar fencing along several forest stretches had worn out due to lack of maintenance and due to wild elephant attack. This apart, an amount of ₹49.70 crore had been sanctioned for rehabilitation of 487 families from the forest areas.
Each family would be provided with ₹10 lakh.
The people from No 301 Colony at Chinnakanal might also be included in the project, said an official of the Forest Department.
No. 301 Colony was created nearly a decade to rehabilitate the landless tribespeople. But many residents of the colony, which was in an elephant corridor, were killed in wild elephant attack.
Abandoned houses
This has forced many families to abandon their houses.
The Forest Department had submitted a report to the government to relocate the people from there.