Pondy once had a beautiful, sandy beach. Unbelievable? According to the documentary, India’s Disappearing Beaches — A wake up call, man’s ‘reckless tinkering with the coastline’ is eating up beaches, not just in Puducherry, but across the country as well. Screened recently as part of Madras Week celebrations at Alliance Francaise, the film has been directed by wildlife filmmaker Shekar Dattatri for Pondy Citizens’ Action Network (PondyCAN).
The 15-minute documentary starts off with the science behind beaches, taking us through how Nature creates and maintains sandy strips of land by the sea.
Here is an interesting fact from the film —‘Most of the beaches of peninsular India are made up of sand that has been transported from inland by rivers, and then distributed along the coast’. Wave action and sea currents, the two most important aspects behind the formation of beaches, ensure that beach sand is constantly moving.
It all depends on the longshore drift, which is, as the movie calls it, ‘a river of sand that moves freely along the coast’.
Beach science
The longshore drift moves sand towards a direction depending on the movement of the waves, caused by winds along the coast. The film details how the drift moves sand north for most parts of the year along India’s east coast.
For a few months of the year, it moves sand south, due to changes in the wind pattern.
What went wrong in Puducherry
In 1986, a harbour that came up in Puducherry eventually ended up destroying the beach. The breakwaters that cut into the sea disturbed the pattern of the longshore drift. In a startling four years, the four kilometre stretch of beach was eroded away. Things only got worse: much like cancer, as Shekar Dattatri put it; erosion ate into 10 kilometres of a beautiful sandy stretch, further affecting 30 kilometres along the coastline.
Fishermen use beaches more than anyone else — imagine, if a sea wall made of boulders is in the place where they once parked their boats, hauled in their catch and mended their nets — where will they go? This is where groynes come into the picture. Created to check erosion, and ‘build up a small beach’ for the purpose, these structures eventually end up as a bane in the long run. The more and more groynes are created, coastal erosion increases along the opposite side. It is a vicious cycle.
Life in Troubled Waters, a Facebook page that documents the poor state of India’s coasts and fishermen, quotes a report that says that there are 480 seawalls and 204 groynes in India, accounting for 300 settlements blocked by the structures. Coastal erosion is silently spreading to fishing villages near Puducherry. Closer home in Kovalam, a fishing village along the ECR, residents are distressed by an eroding coastline.
Solution
If seawalls and groynes are just temporary solutions, then what is the answer? In Pondy, engineers recommended a ‘sand by-pass system’, using a dredger to pump the excess sand accumulated on the south side of the harbour to the north side. This worked, but sadly, was given up.
The film goes on to say that there are ways to restore our beaches. ‘Planning coastal development’ and ‘strictly regulating the number of ports and other hard coastal structures’ are ways to do so.
Founded in 2007, PondyCAN is an NGO that works “to preserve and enhance the natural, social, cultural and spiritual environment”. Their movie is available on YouTube and at http://www.disappearingbeaches.org
