Shifting sands of (mal) development

We were on a beach. Somewhere close to Puducherry. The sight was
surreal: half-smashed houses with wide open fronts, people still
living in them. The devastation was caused not by a sea storm or a
cyclone, but by the eroded beach. The sea had crept up to the village;
there was no protection between the sea and the village.

Why was this happening, I asked. My guides were members of the Pondy
Citizens’ Action Network (Pondy­CAN), which has worked tirelessly to
bring beach erosion to national attention. To understand this, we
walked a little distance away. From the beach, I could see massive
granite stones piled up to build a groyne stretching into the sea.
This structure, made to protect villages from erosion, ends up with
protecting one village, but destroying
another, explained my guides.

But I still could not see the connection. How could one small
structure like this change coastal ecology? Then I got a lesson of my
life. Civil engineer Probir Banerjee and marine engineer Aurofilio
Schiavina explained that a beach is not just a lot of sand. “Beaches
are rivers of sand” because each year the waves transport huge
quantities of sand from north to south and from south to north. During
the southwest monsoon some 600,000 cubic metres of sand
is moved towards the north, and in the three months of the northeast
monsoons (when winds are fierce) 100,000 cubic metres are transported
towards the south across the eastern coast of the country.

So beaches are living creatures—winds and waves bring sand in one
season and take it away in another. My teachers further explained
marine science to me: “Then, think of the groyne as a dam in a river
which will block the movement of sand, not water.” In this case, the
groyne has stopped the movement of sand to the beach ahead. This beach
does not grow and when the wind changes, the monsoon gets fierce, the
sea moves in. There is no beach to protect the
land beyond.

The lesson was not finished yet. Our next stop was the Puducherry
harbour, with a breakwater fingering its way into the sea to protect
the boats. This structure, built in 1986, marked the beginning of
devastating changes in the coast. Once the harbor was built, it first
changed the beach closest to it —the beach along the city of
Puducherry.

“I played on the beach as a child,” said V Narayanasamy, member of
Parliament from Puducherry and minister of state in the Prime
Minister’s Office. “What beach?” I asked. All I could see was granite
stones piled along the ocean promenade. By then it was evening. People
had gathered, as they do to enjoy the beach and the sunset. But there
was no sand or beach. Only rocks. All this had been lost in a living
memory of 15-20 years. A people had lost their
playground. More importantly, a city had lost its critical ecosystem,
which would protect its land and recharge its groundwater. And fishers
had lost their livelihood.

This is just the beginning, explained Banerjee. This structure, small
by any standard of modern harbour or port, has spun a chain of beach
changes along the coast. The groyne we saw earlier had been built
because the length of the coast stretching 10-20 km was now
destabilised. We could see piles of sand accumulated before the
harbour, blocked from making its way to regenerate the beaches. Now
every beach needs a groyne and every groyne adds to the problem
of the next beach.

Besides, just think of the amount of granite that is brought from long
distances after destroying hills, and the carrying trucks adding to
nasty pollution. Just think how much is being lost only because we
cannot plan to mitigate damage.

This is the key message. Ports are interventions to the natural
ecology of coasts. But we neither understand the impacts, nor worry
about ways to deal with the damage. A few years ago, Puducherry woke
up to the reality that their harbour was to be rebuilt and contracts
and concessions had been awarded to transform it into a massive port
(with capacity to handle 20 million tonnes of cargo a year). The
citizens’ group went to court against the project. But
the developer—strangely enough, with no experience in ports, but in
building shops and malls—is not letting go. This is a sweet deal,
which brings real estate benefits as the port concession package comes
with cheap city land bundled in for recovery of cost.

In this stretch of some 600 km, one can count seven ports that exist
and another three are proposed. This is when each existing port is not
used to capacity and is being upgraded big time. Then why are we
building more ports? Is this development? Or land-grab?

There is no policy for siting and number of ports in the country. The
Central government knows only about “major” ports and leaves the rest
of the business—permission to locate and build other ports—to state
governments. There is no distinction between a major port and a state
port. It is just a matter of how many one can fit into the coast as
fast and profitably as possible. Nobody, therefore, knows how many
ports are being built. Nobody cares
about the cumulative impact on rivers of sand.

Surely, this cannot be called development. Can it?

Post your comments on this editorial online at
http://cseindia.org/content/shifting-sands-mal-development

by Sunita Narain