When the tsunami struck the village of Kanathur Reddikuppam on the East Coast Road, Ramadas Elumalai saved himself by clinging to a thorny screw palm in a large grove. The village lost only two people in the tidal wave. That was not entirely a matter of luck. The nature of the beach surrounding Kanathur Reddikuppam, a fishing hamlet about 30km south of Chennai, was a major factor in reducing mortality and damage. To the north and south, the village was fringed by vast sandy beaches with rolling sand dunes.
Thickets of screw palm or pandanus grew in the folds of the dunes. To its east, a substantial strip of sand separated the village from the Bay of Bengal.
I visited Reddikuppam three months ago with my friend K Saravanan. He is a fisherman from Urur Kuppam, a village near the Besant Nagar beach in Chennai.
Reddikuppam is only half the village it used to be. Fishing villages are nothing without the extended coastal commons for various livelihood activities. Reddikuppam had none. The screw palm grove was gone. Not even the odd thicket was to be seen. The sprawling dunes on either side of the village had been flattened and enclosed by compound walls. Some had luxury bungalows, lawns and swimming pools. Others like the one that Saravanan was pointing to were empty. “We used to play cricket there,” said Saravanan about the walled-off property to the north of the village.
A sign on a wall read: “Not for Sale. Sneha Farms”.
According to Saravanan, a few villagers had taken money to allow a private party to enclose the village commons, including the route to the village cemetery. “Now they take their dead on a circuitous route,” he said.
There was no beach in front of the village. A few boats were moored on a concrete platform. The sea licked menacingly at the base of the platform. “In rough weather, we carry the boats — eight men to a boat — nearly 200m down the coastline to find empty spaces,” said Elumalai. Elite encroachers had walled off all the coastal commons, including the intertidal zone. “The waves knock the walls down. But they rebuild it. We too knock it down in rough weather to park our boats,” he said.
Tamil Nadu, with 581 fishing villages dotting its 1,000km coastline, has a pretty crowded coast. In village after fishing village, Reddikuppam’s story of moneyed encroachers is repeated. Luxury resorts, tourism infrastructure, desalination plants, roads, thermal power plants, industries, ports and jetties, nuclear plants, sea sand mining — the list of activities that have altered the natural features of the coast and taken over the coastal commons is long, and only growing lengthier every day.
Sandy beaches, dunes and coastal vegetation like pandanus, casuarina, palmyra and mangroves, and wetlands like estuaries, lagoons and lakes are natural shock absorbers that can tackle the ocean’s extreme behaviour.
Dismantling these, building close to the sea or doing anything else that would erode protective beaches will turn even routine weather events, such as storms, into calamities.
Neither prevention, nor cure
The tsunami has taught our authorities only one thing well — to warn people of impending storms and get them to find their way to safety.
But disaster management is more than reducing the loss of life. Dealing with sea-borne disasters such as tsunamis and storms begins with robust town and country planning, a sound understanding of how nature works and waters flow,demarcation of danger zones and a healthy fear of the sea and skies.
Implementing the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification (CRZ) sincerely would have helped build resilience in coastal areas against the vagaries of the sea. This far-sighted, though heavily watered down, law restricts construction along a 500 metre-wide coastal strip, and allows only basic infrastructure for fisherfolk and activities that require seafront facilities within this area.
But like flies drawn to a forbidden fruit, the law seems to have attracted violators of all hues. The enforcement agency, the State Coastal Zone Management Authority (SCZMA) headed by a secretary to the state government, has teeth but will not bite. In 2011, the Centre directed all maritime states to identify CRZ violations and initiate action at the earliest. In October 2014, SCZMA responded to a Right to Information request stating that not a single violation had been identified in Tamil Nadu.
Unlike the tsunami, which was a tidal wave that washed ashore and returned as quickly as it arrived, the seaward moving tide of illegal encroachments by people and industry has been relentless and shows no signs of receding.
Immediately after the tsunami, there was some talk of acting against CRZ violations. But that momentary spark of reason subsided within months of the disaster. The government did nothing to challenge elite violations, but put its weight behind attempts to free up coastal real estate by relocating fisherfolk from the coast citing their own safety as a reason. With the tsunami reducing seaside real-estate prices, speculators mopped up lowpriced beach properties on a wager that people will forget their fear of the sea. They were right. They made a killing.
Constructed in the mid-’90s amidst protests that it would damage the coastal ecology and violate the CRZ notification, the East Coast Road predictably triggered an ‘ecocidal’ spree of real-estate strip development on either side of the highway. Most of the construction between Chennai and Mamallapuram is less than a decade old. If a tsunami were to strike now, the damage to property will be far more severe than it was in 2004.
Building up trouble
In 2011, the Centre for Development Finance and IIT-Madras released a jointly authored report on the replacement cost of major infrastructure such as ports, roads and power plants at risk from a one-metre sea level rise. It pegged the cost at between ₹47,418 crore and ₹53,554 crore (in 2010 terms). An article by the report’s authors Sudhir Chella Rajan and Sujatha Byravan in The Hindu Business Line explains what this means: “While a one-metre rise in mean sea level would permanently inundate about 1,100sqkm of Tamil Nadu, the area at risk turns out to be about six times as much as a result of associated threats from intense storms and high storm surges. Coastal erosion, increased flooding and salt-water intrusion will also accompany the sea level rise and these were not estimated in the report. Further, since private investments such as resorts, and shrimp farms were not included, the report provides only a conservative estimate.”
Cataclysmic events such as the tsunami tend to push slowmotion disasters such as sea-level rise and routine events like cyclones beneath the radar. Tamil Nadu’s coast is especially erosion-prone and vulnerable to cyclones.
In fact, the latter is most likely to increase in frequency and intensity in a climate-changed scenario.
A 2008 study by the Institute of Ocean Management (IOM), Anna University, examined 30 locations along the coast of Tamil Nadu out of which 18 were found to be erosion-prone. As land retreats in the face of an advancing sea, human settlements and infrastructure that were once protected from the sea become exposed to its temperamental violence. Sea water creeps into fresh water aquifers, rendering it unfit for drinking or agriculture.
More dangerously, such erosion has the potential to drastically alter vital wetland ecosystems.
The IOM report warns that the Ennore port constructed on Kattupalli island has already begun eroding the beaches to the north of the breakwater. When the erosion eats away the sand bar separating the famed brackishwater Pulicat lake from the Bay of Bengal, the lake may even merge with the sea, displacing coastal dunes and beaches, and exposing new populations to harm.
It is not just erosion but also accretion that is a problem. The accretion caused by the long breakwater of the private-sector Ennore Satellite Port, for instance, has closed the mouth of the Ennore creek, according to the IOM report.
Every year, crores of rupees are spent on dredging open the mouth of the river. Similar disasters are waiting to happen at virtually every location that the government has planned a port, power plant or desalination plant.
These artificial infrastructures of commerce are systematically dismantling the natural infrastructure that once ensured the survival of people and other life forms.
Change for the worse
The 1,500MW North Chennai Thermal Power Station (NCTPS) is bound on one side by the Buckingham Canal. A spanking new, impressive and totally out-of-place highway runs alongside the canal. Tidal flats are sprawled out on the other side of the road. Both the canal and the mudflats — a productive ecosystem — were choked with fly ash from the power plant. Fly ash was everywhere. On one fly ash-covered stretch of mudflats stood a signboard that declared the “land” belonged to Ennore port. This was not land; at least not yet. But the port had fly ash as a reason to be optimistic about its conversion from water to land.
Such sprawling wetlands are excellent flood mitigators. Their vast surface area allows them to swell and accommodate rainwater and tidal surges. Converting them into real estate will exacerbate flooding and deflect the impact of storm surges to less resilient areas.
Besides harming local communities, the land-use changes caused and triggered by industrial activities will also hurt the activities themselves. In 2008, Cyclone Nisha ripped up the submarine metal works associated with the 100-million-litres-a-day desalination plant in Minjur, a few kilometres north of the Ennore port. Now, port-induced erosion will make this critical plant and the city residents dependent on it even more vulnerable. Cyclone Hudhud has already faded from our collective memories. But that cyclone of October 2014 brought Visakhapatnam to its knees, crippled all its industries including the famed steel plant.
In 2014, the World Bank extended a loan of $236 million for a disaster risk-reduction project in coastal Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. However, much larger sums of money are to be invested in funding “development” activities that will compromise resilience-lending ecological features such as wetlands, dunes, mangroves and beaches. From innocuous sounding proposals for beach beautification to ghastly strip mining of beach sands, Tamil Nadu’s coast has been opened up for a suicidal pursuit of “development”.
It is not the tsunami that we should fear, but the monumental hubris of modern humanity that has already put us in harm’s way.
( Nityanand Jayaraman is a Chennai-based writer and social activist.)