Around 1.30 a.m. on March 10, T.M. Chashil Kumar a.k.a Unni Varadam’s mobile phone was unusually busy. As head of a conservation volunteer group, Kaattuthee Prathirodha Sena (force fighting forest fires), Unni was coordinating the movements of his co-volunteers from different parts of Kerala to address a wildfire call from the Vellikulangara Forest Range in Thrissur.
By 1.40 a.m., Unni was at Palakkad Junction Railway Station scurrying to catch the next train to Thrissur. Another member, Narayana Swami, had already boarded a train from Thiruvananthapuram and Mukundan A. was about to start from Malappuram. Shameer Ali was ready at Mannarkkad. Gokul and Prasad had already reached the Mupliyam forest station, where the fire was reported. Luckily, the fire was doused faster than expected.
The conservation volunteer group functioning under the supervision of Mannarkkad Range Forest Officer N. Subair was the latest in a series of successful experiments in fighting forest fires in Kerala that records relatively fewer fires compared to several States, including Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, and Maharashtra, as per the Forest Survey of India, 2019.
