Every time there is a cyclone warning, fear and anxiety begin to take root in her, rising and ebbing, just as the waves crash that the shore, not more than a kilometer away from her own house.
Chellaboyina Venkata Lakshmi, a homemaker, is not new here. It has been 30 years since she came to Chinna Gollapalem, a remote village in the Kruthivennu mandal of Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh.
A lingering fear of the uncertainty takes over her heart as she wonders if the sea is advancing into the land. While she says the sea has not harmed the people here at any time, she cannot yet dismiss the possibility of it doing so in the future.
“The sea is Gangamma (Goddess Ganga) for us. We are not scared of the sea. But water is extremely powerful. If Her (Gangamma) will be, our whole village will be under the water in no time,” says Venkata Lakshmi. Her husband is a daily wage labourer, and her two sons are employed; one is in Hyderabad and the other lives with them.
Other women and a few men in the village second her contradictory statements about the sea being harmless and the possibility of it destroying their houses. There is a reason for that.
The village sarpanch Penumala Sunil says coconut, cashew and casuarina trees have been eroded gradually by the sea for a long time now, most of them only in the past 16 years.
Experts say two factors contribute to erosion here: wave activity and land subsidence.
Out of the 8,000 acres of agricultural land in the village, where coconut, casuarina and cashew trees are grown, trees on 1,200 acres, belonging to around 600 farmers, have been lost, the sarpanch says.
“Most of them are small farmers, having one or two acres. There are a handful of them having more than 100 acres, too,” he adds. Only 20% of the village’s population, which is 8,138 as per the 2011 Census, own land here, while the rest are all fishermen, he says.
Livelihood challenges
The two main occupations of the people in the village are fishing and agriculture. On the one hand, the sea is eroding their crops, and on the other, the catch has come down significantly in Upputeru Creek, the villagers say, worrying that their two primary livelihood sources are gradually shrinking, forcing many to migrate to cities and towns in search of work.
China Gollapalem is an island village surrounded by the Bay of Bengal on one side and Upputeru Creek on the other two sides. Upputeru, the only outlet of the Kolleru Lake into the Bay of Bengal, travels 60 km before meeting the sea near Chinna Gollapalem.
Changed geography
The village is connected to the mainland by a bridge over the creek. “The village was not always an island,” says Borra Veeraswamy (57), a government teacher here. Recalling the 1970s when he was a child, he says: “There used to be a ‘Dandu Daari’ here, a path constructed during the British rule, from Machilipatnam to the village, for the troops to move. Now, the path is nowhere to be seen.” The geography of the village changed after a new branch of the Upputeru channel was constructed, he adds.
An explanation of this can be found in a research paper titled ‘The Circulation and Flow Regime of Upputeru, Outlet Channels of Kolleru Lake, India,’ published in 2019, wherein professors P.S.N. Acharyulu and four others from the Department of Meteorology and Oceanography, Andhra University, point out that in 1973, a new channel was dug up to overcome the problem of flooding of the original Upputeru channel, which the paper says, was narrow and shallow.
“The last desilting was done in 1996. If the government takes up desilting works again, there will not be any erosion”Penumala SunilSarpanch, Chinna Gollapalem
Many paddy fields depended on the Upputeru along its course. However, because it was narrow, the channel used to get flooded during monsoon season, as Kolleru Lake had a high amount of discharge, thereby inundating the fields. This necessitated the construction of a new channel or mouth. The original course circled 12 km around the village to reach the sea, while the new one, which was constructed at Losari, a village in Bhimavaram mandal in the same district, was a straight line to the sea. It is 4.4 km long.
“After the new branch was constructed, the village was cut off from the mainland. It became a man-made island,” the teacher says. While being an island did not make the village prone to sea erosion, the change in geography added to the problem.
According to the research paper, one reason for the erosion is the impact of the wave currents during the southwest and northeast monsoons and the waves’ convergence and divergence activity. It says that wave convergence (concentration of energy) occurs between the mouths of the two channels, separated by 7 km. “The convergence of waves is significant along the region in between the two mouths of the river. Since wave convergence causes high wave energies, the region in between the mouths of the river shows erosion,” the paper says.
It is in between the two mouths, along the 7 km coastline, that Chinna Gollapalem village is located. Today, as one takes a stroll along the village’s main road, flanked by dense and tall coconut trees, to the shore, one cannot tell apart the Upputeru from the sea. There is just water on all the three sides, threatening to march into the land. Already, one can see many uprooted coconut trees floating in the sea.