India's vanishing shore

India Blooms: Cyclone Thane hit the southern shores of the country recently leaving major devastations in its wake. Memories of tsunami, though it happened more than five years ago, recurred all over again. Another Aila, the cyclone that had devastated Bengal’s coastline in 2009, is not a remote possibility either. Nature’s fury is way beyond human control and the ensuing destructions.

...To add to the fear of doomsday is the fact that the number of people exposed to natural disasters is expected to more than double by 2050. Well, that gives us a few more years. But the sad truth is that millions of victims are likely to be from India. The culprit, says the World Bank, is rapid urbanisation and the extreme weather stemming from climate change.

With such nature- induced holocaust staring us in the eye, the shoreline mapping project along the coast of India by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management (NCSCM), Chennai, is a welcome move. The Sundarbans in West Bengal has been identified globally as a critically affected area.

Both erosion (leading to land being swallowed up by the sea) and accretion (deposit of sediments that makes ports like Haldia useless) are natural processes but human activity is interfering with nature’s trail too. “The entire Medinipur stretch of the coast, west of river Hooghly is predominantly under accretion from Digha to Mandermoni. While the lower and middle sectors of Sundarban estuarine system is under intense erosion, the head-ward portion of the same shows accretion. This is the typical response of any micro tidal estuary against sea level rise,” says Kakoli Sen Sarma, geologist cum remote sensing specialist from the Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) project at the Institute of Environmental Studies and Wetland Management (IESWM), Kolkata. Sen Sarma has recently concluded a study of the dynamic nature of the Sundarban estuary on the West Bengal coast....

A ferry in the Sundarbans, shot by Frances Voon, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license