Around this time of last year, Hemendra Samal from Bhubaneswar travelled to Paradip for a two-day stay at the picturesque Nehru Bungalow in the port town to beat the heat and relish the majestic march of sea waves.
The enchanting beauty of the place prompted Samal to revisit it last week. But he was left bewildered to see the sea turning violent, with the mighty waves dashing against the boundary of the guest house named and inaugurated by India’s first prime minister in the sixties.
“It seemed the sea had gone wild and furious. It appeared as if it was lurking its ugly head to gobble up the land area. I felt threatened, finding many areas close to the shore bearing the brunt of the advancing sea. Nature is unpredictable, and large areas close to the Paradip port town may come under oceanic submergence sooner or later,” Samal, the traveller from the State’s Capital City, observed.
The scale of sea erosion in Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, Balasore, Puri and Ganjam districts is intense, with people living in coastal patches contending with the sea scourge. The mighty sea waves had devoured several parts of the Satabhaya gram panchayat in Kendrapara district, forcing the state government to relocate the affected people to a resettlement colony.
Similarly, the Pentha in the Kendrapara district was bearing the brunt of sea erosion. To tame the marauding sea, the state government has constructed a geo-synthetic seawall along the 800-metre-long vulnerable coast. The geo-tube structure, built a couple of years back, has so far managed to stop the sea waves from advancing.
Similarly, projects to arrest the advancing sea by stone barriers have been taken up in Jagatsinghpur and Ganjam districts, with not much success as sea erosion goes unabated.
The vulnerability of Odisha’s coastline to tidal surge and consequent erosion has come under sharp focus with 7.51 per cent of the State’s sea coast being battered by mighty waves and undergoing erosion in last 28 years, according to a joint study by Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCQIS) and National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR).
As per the atlas of Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI), maps for the entire coastline of India prepared by both the research agencies, a 37-km stretch of Odisha comes under the coastal vulnerability index, which constitutes 7.51 per cent of the State’s 480 km stretch coastline. The coastal States of Karnataka and Goa lie at the top of the coastal vulnerability index, with 9.54 per cent of coastline exposed to the vagaries of sea erosion.
The research wings using data on sea level rise, coastal slope, shoreline change rate, coastal elevation, coastal geomorphology, tidal range and significant wave height have come out with the CVI atlas.
The Satabhaya, Pentha and Gahirmatha beaches in Kendrapara district, Ganjam port north in Ganjam district and Sahsadabedi in Jagatsinghpur district were found to be the worst sea erosion-hit coastal pockets of the state as per the report.
The NCCR, an attached office of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, monitors shoreline changes along the Indian Coast. It has carried out a national shoreline change assessment mapping for the Indian coast using 28 years of satellite data along nine coastal States and two Union Territories (UTs) to provide information for coastal management strategy.
While Odisha has around 17 per cent of India’s coastline (480 kms), the State faces around 35 per cent of the cyclonic storms along with tidal surge. The State is the sixth most cyclone-prone area of the World. There are also flat terrains with fertile agricultural land with a dense population adjacent to the coastline.