About 140 kilometres from Mumbai is a coastal village called Vadhavan, where about 200 houses, mostly with Mangalorean tiles, are built along an arterial road. There are paddy fields, mango and chickoo trees, and the ocean is about 100 metres away. Suru trees on the beach prevent sand erosion. On June 19, the Union Cabinet decided that a port would be constructed here, across 17,471 hectares, impacting several villages in Palghar district of Maharashtra.
The all-weather offshore deep-draft facility, under the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA), will cost about ₹76,220 crore. By 2029, it is slated to annually handle 23.2 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units, a measure of cargo-handling capacity). It is the 13th major port in India and Maharashtra’s third. “Once it is operationalised, fishing activity will be banned within a 12-nautical-mile radius (about 40 sq. km),” says Narayan Patil, 70, a Vadhavan resident. As a journalist for 50 years, he first heard about the then-proposed port in the early 90s. “As I began to dig more, I understood that it would displace entire villages,” he remembers. He launched one of the fiercest campaigns to protect the area almost three decades ago and is the president of Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, formed in the late 1990s, which fights in the sea, in the streets, and in India’s courts against the building of the port, slated to be one of the world’s top 10 in terms of capacity.
The people of Vadhavan and 29 other villages in Palghar district are grouped under the Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti that has the support of 12 other associations. They fear that construction will destroy the coastline and the biodiversity of its waters, adversely impacting fishing — the lifeline of the communities here.
Fear and foreboding
In its 2021 report, the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute said 20,809 fisherfolk from 5,333 household would be impacted in 16 fishing villages (not taking into account villages inland), along 20 km of the coastline. Now, the port authority has roped in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences to conduct a survey over the next three to four months to ensure “no one is left out”, as JNPA chairperson Unmesh Sharad Wagh puts it.
Vadhavan port officials say that 571 hectares of land will be used for road and rail connectivity, 30% of which will come from the forest area, for which 10,179 trees will be axed. However, Patil says that another fallout will be the mangroves that are ecological buffers across 98.3 acres of the coast. “They will be impacted with rising sea levels,” he feels. Also, 201.51 hectares — primarily farmland — will be acquired from 21 villages for rail and road construction, impacting agriculture in the area.
The number of households eligible for compensation is already a point of conflict, with three entities involved in the tussle. The JNPA will offer support for fisherfolks’ loss of livelihood, the Western Railway for land on which rail tracks are to be built, and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) for land on which roads will come up. State government bodies acquire the land that comes under their purview.
Wagh says, “We are ready to provide compensation to the fishing community as per Maharashtra’s policies and legislations.” He adds that they are open to dialogue and to offering compensation that’s “more than what is prescribed”. The JNPA chairperson says fishing will be restricted only within a 30 sq. km radius from the port. Villagers’ fears also stem from the 1969-commissioned Tarapur Atomic Power Station (TAPS), which impacted 1,250 families of Akkarappatti and Popharan, as per Bombay High Court documents. Situated just 12 km from the Vadhavan port, it has a daily capacity of 1,080 MW. After more than five decades, 438 Project Affected Persons (PAPs) are still fighting for compensation.
Rough sea ahead
In February this year the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change gave the project its Environmental Clearance and Coastal Regulation Zone certificate. Ashok Ambhire, 76, a resident of Dhakati Dahanu, one of the villages that will be impacted, has been fishing for a living for 50 years. The seaside getaway for Mumbaikars is across the creek from Vadhavan. Dhakati is a Marathi word meaning little but people here call it a “golden belt”.
In 2021-22, the village supplied almost one-third of the Dahanu zone’s 5,000 tonnes of catch, as per data from the Department of Fisheries. Most of the catch is exported; a lot of the Bombay duck and prawns are sent to Mumbai and Gujarat. Ambhire serves as the president of the Gungwada Machhimar Society, a cooperative society of fisherfolk, and is the adviser of the Thane Zilha Machhimar Madhyavarti Sahakari Sangh Maryadit, the district-level union of fisherfolk. He has two trawlers and his two IT-qualified sons and grandson are a part of his business. “We are being assured of bigger vessels to help us go deeper into the sea, but what’s the point if the upcoming port destroys the golden belt?” he says.
Supporter who believes the nation’s interest must be prioritised over his own, but for the last couple of decades, he has been opposing the port project because of it being an ecological threat. “Our earnings will dwindle. The government will not compensate us for the remainder of our lives,” says Ambhire, who chose to make fishing his living after a post-graduate degree in education. Wagh says the port authority has been considerate to local feelings. Every year on Akshaya Tritiya, people from this belt embark on a pilgrimage to the Shankhodhar shrine, where Lord Rama is believed to have conducted his father’s post-death rituals.
The shrine, otherwise submerged, is accessible only during the lowest tides. When JNPA learnt that project’s 2015 proposal would see its submergence, villagers protested. “The project’s site was shifted to protect this sacred place,” says Wagh, who says this is a “green port initiative”.
Not plain sailing
Of the port’s project area, 16,900 hectares will be the port limit while the remaining will be set aside for road and rail connectivity. At a press conference, Wagh said that the railways and NHAI would look at compensation for people in areas where they will undertake construction. The NHAI is offering ₹1.75 crore per hectare; the railways are willing to discuss this with the people. The port limit has three components: a waterfront of 15,363.5 hectares, an intertidal zone of 1,488 hectares to be reclaimed with 200 million cubic metres of sand, and a 63.5-hectare berth area. “Some portion of our village already witnesses the effect of the changing sea levels during the monsoon. Once reclamation commences, there will be flooding,” fears Patil. JNPA claims that its analysis, which factored in the highest of the tides, didn’t show any such concerns.
The port’s proposed offshore location is the breeding ground of lobsters, pomfrets, fourfinger threadfin, Bombay duck, and prawns, as per the National Institute of Oceanography. There is also the blackspotted croaker or ghol, called ‘sea gold’, a single sizeable catch of which can help fisherfolk earn a few lakh rupees, as it is in demand internationally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified it as “near threatened”.
Dahanu taluka was declared an ecologically fragile area in 1991 by the Central government. The Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority (DTEPA), the monitoring authority that consisted of members from the government and some experts in an individual capacity, was established in 1996. In September 1998, DTEPA had disallowed the port’s construction, but in June 2015, it asked the JNPA to amend the port’s plan owing to ecological concerns. About five years later, the authority proposed to make it an offshore port that would cause less impact on the environment and the inhabitants. Following that, consultations with various stakeholders started.
On June 27 last year, a non-profit organisation, the Conservation Action Trust (CAT), which had been lobbying against the port construction for a couple of decades, received an intimation for one such public consultation scheduled by the DTEPA for July 6, 2023. However, CAT says the notice given for the meeting was very short and only a few local people could attend. At the meeting, a site visit was announced to explain the plan to the affected people, but that never happened, it claims.
The DTEPA granted permission for the “major port” on July 31, 2023. CAT responded with a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Bombay High Court (HC), raising environmental concerns, but the HC dismissed it in April this year. In May, CAT, along with other parties, filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court (SC) to challenge the HC ruling. The CAT, in its plea to the SC, emphasised “the ecological importance of Dahanu and the need to protect” the area. The apex court, in its last hearing on July 15, issued notice to the DTEPA, JNPA, and other parties, and made CAT co-petitioners in an ongoing writ petition filed by another environment conservation non-profit, Vanashakti.