It is a golden harvest time for a handful of enterprising people of Murukallingal, near Chaliyam, a coastal village in Kadalundi grama panchayat in Kozhikode district’s southwestern border. The ongoing mussel harvesting taking place there appears to be doing justice to the very name of the locality. Murukallingal means the land of stones with oysters.
People from far and near reach Murukallingal these days in the morning to buy medium-size mussels harvested from the river. One of the tributaries of the Chaliyar flows through Murukallingal and empties into the Arabian Sea at Beypore, hardly a kilometre away in the west.
“This river is ideal for mussel farming, especially in the Murukallingal area, a place known for oysters from long. The mussels cultivated here are as good as those collected from the sea at Chaliyam,” says M.C. Kutty Koya, a resident of Murukallingal. He says he has bought at least 60 kg of mussel in the last one month.
