Documented secret
Thrikkakkara in southeast Ernakulam district is like any other panchayat in Kerala witnessing a rapid transition from a village to a town. The panchayat houses the All India Radio broadcast station, the headquarters of the district administration and many commercial institutions. Yet the panchayat also comprises elders who are treasure houses of the fast-disappearing knowledge of natural biodiversity. These are people who can differentiate at least 24 varieties of rice, use more than 50 local plants as herbal medicine and cultivate 12 varieties of banana, seven varieties of tubers or eight varieties of mangoes. Such knowledge and those who hold such knowledge on the natural/cultivated species of plants and animals have now been brought to the public domain not only in the Thrikkakkara panchayat, but also in all the 86 panchayats in Ernakulam district through a massive, collective exercise called the People's Biodiversity Register Programme (PBRP).
This is not the first time that the People's Biodiversity Registers (PBRs) is being attempted or its perceived merits and dangers debated in the state. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) had compiled a PBR of Puthur panchayat in Thrissur district in early 1990s. If these were pioneering efforts guided by a handful of spirited volunteers or activists, the preparation of 86 PBRs in Ernakulam district is the outcome of appropriating the concept of PBR within the decentralised planning process, the People' Plan Campaign, now underway in Kerala.
It goes to the credit of the Ernakulam district panchayat and a few social activists including M K Prasad of KSSP that the local body could take up the PBRP, despite the fact that the People's Plan Campaign had not officially recommended any specific programme for district level documentation of biodiversity in the Ninth Plan. The PBRP, launched in 1998, was, instead, supported and funded by the planning department. An elaborate network of working groups was created for the programme in all the three tiers of the panchayati raj structure