Between the sea and a new home: The battles of Kerala’s coastal communities

Coastal erosion, worsened by the Adani Vizhinjam seaport project, has displaced thousands in Kerala. The state’s rehabilitation project seems barely adequate to meet these challenges.

Brijit spends her days at the two-storeyed house running a small stationery store. She locks up and leaves every evening to a rented house a few blocks away. Even though Brijit and her family have been staying there for more than two years now, she cannot bring herself to call it home. Home, for her, is still this, where she spends the most part of her days. A dilapidated building only a few minutes’ walk from the Valiyathura bridge, located dangerously close to the ocean, and uninhabitable for a long time now.

Brijit’s family is among the hundreds whose homes have been affected by coastal erosion, aggravated by the construction of the Vizhinjam International Sea Port. Contrary to the common perception that the Ockhi cyclone in late 2017 caused coastal erosion, Brijit says that it was the port construction that accelerated the process.

“Ockhi did wreak havoc on the homes close to the coast,” Brijit recalls, “but once the sea withdrew, it returned to normal. There has been coastal erosion here at a slow rate over the years and Ockhi didn’t really make that worse. But the Vizhinjam port construction certainly did.”

The Vizhinjam International Seaport, said to be India’s first deep-water container transshipment port, is a public – private partnership project, implemented jointly by the Government of Kerala and the Adani Ports & SEZ. The idea of a port in Vizhinjam, the largest fishing village in Kerala, started first in the 1990s, and came to fruition in 2015 when the project was awarded to the Adani Group by the Kerala Government. The first phase of the project, set to be complete soon, had an estimated budget of over Rs. 5,500 crores. While the port is technically considered to be owned by the state government, the Adani Vizhinjam Port Private Limited manages the overall design and construction, as well as owns the management and operational rights for a period of 65 years.

The Vizhinjam Seaport project has been the subject of debates and controversies since its commencement, with the environmental and geographical ramifications brought on by the construction of the port being called out. Subsequently, Thiruvananthapuram has witnessed extensive protests and agitations from the fishing communities since then, demanding the cessation of the project to this day.

For the hundreds of families whose houses were partially or fully affected due to coastal erosion — allegedly brought on by the construction of the seaport — the rehabilitation procedure from their unlivable conditions by the government had been slow. They were put up in godowns, warehouses, and other makeshift areas at first. It took months for them to move out from that environment, and only after a great deal of agitation and strikes from their side did the government take notice and set the ball rolling for the families’ rehabilitation.

The sea ate their homes

Brijit points to the sea and says, “We had more than a few hundred metres of coast here once upon a time. After the Vizhinjam project began, the coast was erased in a shockingly quick period.”

The house is now separated from the sea by a cluster of large rocks that the government has placed all along the coast. But even that wasn’t done on time — not before months of protests by the affected communities, Brijit says.

Not until two rows of houses in front of hers were lost to the ravaging sea. 

Brijit and her family are covered in the Punargaeham rehabilitation housing scheme carried out by the Department of Fisheries, Kerala.

The Punargaeham project implemented across Kerala, is aimed at providing housing for coastal communities living in areas vulnerable to coastal erosion. More specifically, it covers those residing within 50 m of the High Tide Line (HTL) zones, which includes 222 marine villages in the state. The project is especially relevant to the Thiruvananthapuram district, which has over four thousand families identified for rehabilitation, owing to the large-scale coastal erosion witnessed in several fishing villages here in the last decade or so.

According to an official report from November 2019 on the Fisheries Department’s website, the scheme had an estimated budget of Rs 2,450 crore. The project aimed at rehabilitating 18,685 families across the state.

While coastal erosion in these regions has been an ongoing occurrence for over 50 years, scientific experts have pointed out that it had always been a slow and steady phenomenon until the Vizhinjam port project commenced. Since then, the coastline witnessed an exponential rise in the rate of erosion in the regions north of Vizhinjam.

AJ Vijayan, an environmental and social activist from Thiruvananthapuram says that, “Marine villages like Valiyathura, Poonthura, Beemapally, Panathura, Cheriyathura, Kochuthoppu, Shangumugham and Kochuveli in Thiruvananthapuram have shown unmistakable signs of coastal erosion in the recent past.”

Currently, the government pays a sum of Rs 5,500 as a monthly allowance for such families to avail rented homes. While many families have explicitly expressed their willingness to relocate to a flat under the Punargaeham scheme, a lot of others, like Brijit, have chosen to avail funds from the Fisheries Department for buying land and constructing a house on it.

‘How do we build a house with such little money?’

These families have found themselves at a tricky crossroads, more than two years after they were displaced from their homes. The total fund allotted to them is a mere Rs 10 lakh, for both the land and the building construction. In cases where the family size is large enough to be classified as multiple, the fund goes up to Rs 20 lakh. Brijit and several other families, who have chosen this scheme, lament how deficient the amount is, especially with the increasing land prices and inflated costs of building a house.

S Anil Kumar, Deputy Director of the Project Implementation Unit, Vizhinjam at the Fisheries Department, notes that the idea of building flat complexes arose due to the dearth of land to build individual houses in urban areas in the state. Anil Kumar stresses that the Punargaeham project shouldn’t be confused with other schemes that are currently in effect, aimed at rehabilitating and providing livelihoods for the populations affected directly due to the Vizhinjam seaport construction.

According to official data, the Punargaeham scheme has marked 4,116 families from the coastal villages in Thiruvananthapuram. Out of that number, 4,044 families have registered themselves as willing to be relocated; 1,439 families have identified new land to purchase and construct a house on, and that has been approved by the necessary authorities as well; 1,191 of these 1,439 families have completed the registration as well. Rs 6 lakh is the lumpsum amount provided for land purchase and the remaining Rs 4 lakh is to be utilised for the construction of a house.

The project was originally planned to be completed by 2022, but Anil Kumar suggests that the displacement due to coastal erosion has been a systematically ongoing issue in Thiruvananthapuram, and it’s hard to set a specific timeline for the project. The construction of 592 more flats is currently in the pipeline.

New apartments, no solutions for livelihood

Four hundred of these flats are being constructed on the land right next to Pratheeksha, a similar flat complex in Muttathara that was completed in 2018 and houses 192 families. Pratheeksha had come into limelight at the time for being the first such scheme to rehabilitate populations whose homes were affected by coastal erosion in the Thiruvananthapuram district. The township is located exactly 1.5 km from the Valiyathura bridge, the nearest spot of beach from it. The fisherfolk residing in Pratheeksha struggle with their daily commute to and from the beach, unlike before, when they lived near the coast. 

The flat complex under construction next to PratheekshaFisheries department

Addressing the concerns of the people on the deficiency of the sum provided for buying land and building a house, Anil Kumar stressed the limitations the Fisheries department and the state government faced in carrying out such a large scale project.

“There’s the shortage of resources for us (the Fisheries department) that interferes with the systematic implementation of this scheme, especially in a highly sensitive region like Thiruvananthapuram,” he says.

The state’s primary focus, he explained, was in rehabilitating as much of the population who faced the risk of displacement due to coastal erosion. Their concern was valid, he agreed, and the funds provided under the Punargaeham scheme weren’t sufficient to cover the whole expenses. Which is why such a scheme would massively benefit from the support of the Union government, he feels. Eventually, Anil Kumar says, the plan is to have these 50 m HTL zones cleared of all human habitation, allowing them to be open coast. The government has been systematically demarcating the regions and classifying them as lands which cannot be transacted or developed, going ahead. 

This is nature, not us: Seaport officials

Sreekumar K Nair, the Chief Executive Officer of Vizhinjam International Seaport Limited, a public sector undertaking, says that most of the land acquired for the Vizhinjam seaport project was “unoccupied” – meaning, it was either barren, or poramboke bhoomi (unassessed lands which are the property of the government).

According to him, “The Vizhinjam rehabilitation programme was centred on the ‘social upliftment’ of the homeless, landless populations residing in and around the seaport. The welfare measures carried out under the Vizhinjam project directly, majorly focussed on those coastal populations who faced livelihood losses or challenges due to the Vizhinjam port.”

Sreekumar also denied the phenomenon of coastal erosion. “The theories that the port’s construction causes attrition in the adjacent coastal regions in Thiruvananthapuram coast is not true. We have conducted studies that can prove this,” he says.  

Anil Kumar also shared the same perspective, suggesting that coastal erosion in regions surrounding Vizhinjam port was “minimal”. As per the studies conducted by a shoreline management committee formed by the state government comprising of experts, the port’s construction hasn’t aggravated erosion at all, he says.

But Sreekumar’s claims, echoed by the Kerala government and the Adani group since the announcement of the Vizhinjam seaport, have been refuted and debunked by subject matter experts during the same period. In November 2023, the Janakeeya Padana Samithi, a team of oceanographers, scientists, and social scientists that came together to comprehensively address the issues arising during the Vizhinjam port’s construction process and those that may emerge once the port becomes operational, released a detailed report titled “Our Beaches, Our Sea: Heritage of Fishing Communities, Usufruct of All Citizens”. The report aimed to emphasise the profound significance of beaches and the adjacent sea in the historical, occupational, social, and cultural context of fishing communities, and addressed the subject of ecological and social problems arising due to Vizhinjam seaport’s construction in Thiruvananthapuram.

Although Punargaeham doesn’t exclude populations of other livelihoods, the great majority of those registered under the scheme, at least in Thiruvananthapuram, belong to traditional fishing families. This also explains the reluctance shown by many of them to move to flats, as that hinders their day-to-day activities. Living farther away from the sea/coast causes all sorts of practical difficulties for the fisherfolk, as experienced by the residents of Pratheeksha flats, many of them engaged in traditional fishing. The fishers in this community must find new ways to transport their equipment to and from their flats daily.

Questions over quality of buildings

Over the years, questions about the feasibility of such projects have also arisen, particularly taking the case study that is Pratheeksha. Mithun, a resident and the association president of the township tells me that the flats are riddled with structural and maintenance issues, some of which the construction agency, ULCCS (Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society), has addressed. However, the residents constantly face issues like water seepage, feeble tiles, and inconsistent water supply for the flats. The land that Pratheeksha sits on was a sewage dump once, which was taken over by the Dairy department to utilise as a fodder farm, before the Fisheries department acquired it.

Pratheeksha flats have displayed structural issues over the years.

A project engineer at ULCCS says that the maintenance issues in Pratheeksha are systematically addressed by the agency, as and when they arise. According to him, ULCCS was only supposed to provide maintenance service for five years after the township’s completion, which should have ended by last year technically.

“The residents of the complex haven’t exactly adhered to the maintenance guidelines that had been communicated to them either. For one, the monthly sewage pumping service for the apartment society is inefficient because of the lackadaisical attitude of the residents,” he claims.

Aneesha Benedict, a resident of Pratheeksha, draws attention to the fact that way too many flats in the township display these issues, for it to be a problem from the residents’ side. In her own flat, the family was extra careful, she says, to not make even the tiniest of renovations or modifications. Still, they have also been at the receiving end of plumbing and other issues.

The second set of apartments under construction alongside Pratheeksha are supposed to address the existing structural issues and each flat will also be slightly more spacious (by more than 10 sq. ft.) this time around, the ULCCS engineer says. The average cost of each flat is estimated to be around Rs 15-20 lakh, against an estimated cost of Rs 10 lakh per flat in Pratheeksha currently.

Irene, the Valiyathura ward councillor, reckons there are more than 250 families who have registered for the housing rehabilitation scheme in her ward. The number of people who have reached out to her and other public officials for rehabilitation has risen steadily in recent years, according to her. One of the main reasons for this is the rapid rate at which coastal erosion has been happening in Valiyathura and surrounding fishing villages since the Vizhinjam seaport construction began, Irene says.

Terrence, a fisher by occupation, is one of those who has already found new land to relocate to and has received a total of Rs 13 lakh out of the Rs 20 lakh available to them. Terrence tells me that the family already has a debt of nearly Rs 15 lakh availed from multiple sources, for the construction of the new house. But despite all these challenges, he is firm on their decision to not opt for a flat.

“We are a large family, of more than six members. We prefer having land and a house of our own, rather than moving to someplace that we can’t even claim ownership of,” Terrence adds grimly.

Terrence’s last point was reiterated by several Pratheeksha residents: that the flat they live in was not in their name, and will not be any time soon. According to the agreement entered by the families with the Fisheries Department, the flats, though technically in their names, are legally the government’s property for 25 years from the date of occupation. This means that the residents cannot sell their flats, nor are they allowed to perform any major structural changes to the building. Initially, the residents had to pay the building tax themselves, but when they realised they couldn’t have ownership of the flat, they went to court seeking a solution to this. The court ultimately ordered the government to take care of the building taxes as well as flat maintenance expenses for as long as the ownership remained in their name. 

Vijayan, like many others who have studied the Vizhinjam issue and the related housing schemes in detail, remains wary about the practicality of a scheme like Punargaeham.

“They raise the example of Pratheeksha as a success model. But the construction of the flats right next to it has been delayed for so long. The government lacks the necessary funds to implement such a big project properly,” he says.

Vijayan, along with several social activists, has been involved in a petition filed before the High Court of Kerala by 128 families from fishing communities in Thiruvananthapuram, citing the adverse environmental and coastal effects brought on by the Vizhinjam International Seaport project. Most of the rehabilitative and compensatory measures by the Kerala government in Thiruvananthapuram started only after such appeals and petitions from the coastal communities reached the court, he points out.

“They might include the coastal rehabilitation activity in Thiruvananthapuram under Punargaeham or other such schemes, but it’s the Vizhinjam protests and agitations that persuaded the government to act on that and speed up the process too,” Vijayan emphasises.

Thresamma, whose house is located a stone’s throw from Brijit’s house, has a different story to tell. She still resides in the same house with three other family members and tells me that she will never agree to be relocated to a flat. Not only that, unlike Brijit, Thresamma’s family has declined to receive the Rs 10 lakh compensation “land & house” package.

“If we accept that, we’ll be out on the streets,” Thresamma says glumly. “We built this house only 10 years ago with a small grant from the Fisheries Department and several personal loans. We cannot afford to take any more loans to buy land or construct another house. Either the government should buy land somewhere and construct a house for us, or give us adequate compensation for the same,” she adds with a look of determination.

Thresamma continues to live in her house despite the risks

Thresamma has not been receiving any monthly rent allowance from the Fisheries Department, unlike the others. She attributes that to the family not relocating themselves to a rental house. On being asked whether she is positive about being included in the Punargaeham list, Thresamma merely says that the government officials have visited her house multiple times and deemed it uninhabitable. The family is hopeful that they get a home of their own soon.

The Punargaeham scheme is still in its early stages and has its proponents as well as detractors, in equal measure. The displacement of populations actively engaged in fishing livelihood to regions away from coastal zones has been criticised by social scientists. At the same time, those who back the scheme have pointed out the need to focus on future measures, given the increasing vulnerability of the people living in such high-risk regions. For the Fisheries department and the state government, this remains the foremost plan in tackling the issue of displacement due to coastal erosion.

Courtesy: The News Minute

Note: This news is originally published in thenewsminute.com and is used completely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes especially for human rights.