Odanthurai in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu was a non-descript panchayat in India. But it is now a model for self-governance and income-generation. Winning many awards, it has attracted dignitaries like the President of the World Bank, ministers from South African countries, researchers, government officials and students from 43 countries.

The panchayat, nestled in the foothills of the Nilgiris, has won accolades for supplying drinking water to all its villagers, providing housing to all, tapping renewable energy and for adopting several green measures. It also has a corruption-free administration and its annual income has grown multi-fold.

The credit goes to R. Shanmugam, who took over as the panchayat’s president in 1996, though he had studied only up to the tenth grade.

The pilot project of the late Chief Minister Jayalalitha’s Pudhu Vaazhvu Thittam (Poverty Reduction Scheme) was first executed here. They have implemented the state government’s Green House Project Scheme under which more than 850 houses were built, the highest in the state, and handed over to the poor. The panchayat was then declared hut-less.

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Megalogomphus superbus Fraser, endemic to the Western Ghats, has been photographed for the first time in nine decades by naturalists Ravindran Kamatchi and S. Gopala Krishnan during a birding outing near Coimbatore.

When they posted the photo grass-green, yellow and reddish-brown colour dragonfly with bottle-green eyes on the WhatsApp group ‘Odonates of the Western Ghats’, they learnt that it was a rare discovery. Scottish botanist Fraser F. C. had described it as the most beautiful species in the book, Fauna of British India.

“Fraser spotted it in 1931 and 1934 at the Boluvampatti forest range near Siruvani, Walayar (Kerala-Tamil Nadu border) and Kallar near Mettupalayam. The dragonfly belongs to gomphidae family which has six dragonflies – two in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, one in Sri Lanka and three others in the North East,” says Kalesh Sivadasan of Travancore Natural History Society. “As aerial predators, they play a crucial role in pest control. It is an aquatic water species that thrives in fresh water, and feeds on mosquitoes and insects that are harmful to humans.”

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