SILENT VALLEY MOVEMENT - WHEN SILENCE BECAME A ROAR

Environmentalists, poets and journalists generated mass opinion against a hydroelectric project and saved Kerala's Silent Valley, one of India's last remaining tropical rainforests

- BY JUMANA SHAH

A thick, velveteen canopy that shuts out the sun in layers of foliage, creepers, ferns and lichen making up the thick undergrowth that carpets the ground beneath, the Silent Valley is a natural wonder—an 89 sq. km tropical rainforest at the heart of the Nilgiri biosphere reserve in the Western Ghats in Kerala’s Palakkad district and a repository of hundreds of rare varieties of flora and fauna. Long before the destruction of the Amazon rainforest became a global cause celebre, environmental activists, poets, journalists and concerned citizens united to save this ecological hotspot from the jaws of ‘development’.