It’s deja vu for Amrat Tandel (46), sarpanch of Danti village in Valsad, with three decades of his second stint on coastal living flashing before his eyes. The looming sea roared at his doorstep reminding him that it’s about time to change his address yet again, for the second time in his life.Around 30 years ago, Tandel lived almost a kilometre inside the sea from the existing coast in Valsad district. “I am at present living in Nani Danti village with the coast just next to my neighbour’s house. My childhood home is submerged in water now,” Tandel told TOI.
“I was one among the 18,000 residents of Moti Danti then. With water engulfing the entire village, all residents migrated to other safer places,” said Tandel who now lives in Nani Danti, a neighbouring village.
‘Over 400 ha of land gone under seawater’
Wealthy families bought land in nearby villages while the financially weaker ones built homes on government land. “Many families even built their homes on crematorium land,” he said.
“Over 400 hectares of private and government land were submerged by seawater when the Arabian sea marched into almost one and half kilometres inside the coastline in the past 50 years. The place where I was born is now half a kilometre inside the sea,” 89-year-old former sarpanch of Danti, Dhanji Tandel told TOI. Like Dhanji, village leaders from Danti, Kakwad, Dandi and other nearby villages have been raising concerns over the advancing coastline and erosion.
“I remember how we would go to hand over memo randums to the district collector about this issue in 1982,” Tandel recalled. Danti’s neighbouring village Dandi too faces the threat of becoming a memory soon. “The coast was around two kilometres away when I was young, but now it is barely 150 metres away. Seawater sometimes enter some parts of the village during major high tides a few times in a year,” said Prakash Patel, former sarpanch of Dandi.
Valsad district collector Kshipra Agre, however, denied commenting on the issue or respond to text messages. Finance minister and BJP MLA from Pardi of Valsad, Kanubhai Desai, told TOI, “The government has started a project to develop embankments across the coastline in Valsad. Lease for sand mining has also been discontinued in the area so that the coastal area is not damaged further.”