Ports, protests major issues in coastal belt

Rajesh Tandel stares impassively as the sea breeze shifts the sand, spraying it against the fragments of fishing nets strung up on poles at the beach beyond his home at Kasarkoda, a village in Honnavar taluka of coastal Karnataka.

- Gerard de Souza

Within each net are hundreds of eggs laid by the reclusive Olive Ridley turtles over the past few weeks, but with the nesting nearing its end and the hatchlings yet to emerge from the 49 protected nests that still remain, Tandel has begun to worry for them.

Tandel, now in his mid-30s, grew up watching the waves crash upon the shore as the tides ebbed and flowed, ran out to sea with the ramponn (fishing net) at a moment's notice every time he or a member of his fishing community noticed a shoal of sardines close to the shore, and season after season the Olive Ridleys laid eggs and the hatchlings went out to sea.

"I have seen days even in the recent past when the entire beach would be filled with sardines in the shallow water and we could literally pick them up by the basket," Tandel says. He and his community of kharvis (fishermen) who grew up learning and understanding the sea were officially named as community co-protectors of the forest department's turtle conservation programme when it was launched more than 30 years ago.

All that is at risk now, as large heaps of red laterite boulders, mud and gravel hastily dumped atop the pale sands stand testimony to what was a ham-handed attempt to force through a 4km road right atop the beach to gain access to the site of a new proposed port at the mouth of the Sharavati river.

Today the sandy beach that is home to eight vaddos (hamlets) of fishers lies buried under bounders, rocks and gravel when in January 2022 hundreds of trucks began dumping rubble, mud and gravel as part of a project to build a four-lane, dedicated road corridor from the national highway to what is a proposed Honnavar Private Port Limit (HPPL). Villagers who protested were arrested and released only after the work was complete.