Hassan Sab did not expect to lose land twice. Standing on Kasarkod beach, in Karnataka’s Honnavar taluk, Sab pointed out to the Arabian sea. There, he explained, “my family owns three acres of land. It was accessible till about four decades ago”. Over the years, however, the mouth of the river Sharavati, which met the sea near their village, Mallukurva, shifted northwards, submerging the village. By the mid 1980s, nearly the entire village was underwater, and most of its residents had relocated.
But after a decade, the sea began to deposit sand back towards the south, and created a sand pit approximately three km long and 600 metres wide, close to where Mallukurva lay submerged. “The sea deposited sand back on the Kasarkod side of the river,” Sab said. “At some places it was only a few 100 metres away from my original village, at some it was about a kilometre away.”
The former residents of Mallukurva believed that the newly emerged land was part of their old village. “There is no other way about it,” Sab said. “Mallukurva was submerged, and now if land is reappearing close to its original location, it has to be Mallukurva.” But as information on the state government’s website on land records makes clear, the revenue department treated the newly emerged land as part of Kasarkod, and named it Tonka, the Konkani word for tip or tail.
This was the mid-1990s, a time during which the number of trawlers and persin boats in the region’s sea waters were increasing, and with this, the amount of fish being landed on the coast. Surplus after fresh sales was also growing – the only way to store this surplus for later sale was by drying it. Since there was now an increased need for space for drying fish, Sab and over 150 other locals, who belong to the fisher community, began to use the newly formed land. “We divided land among ourselves,” said Sab. “We used natural identification marks on the river bank, such as a mango tree, light house and the bridge to identify approximate boundaries of our individual land shares.”
Locals built temporary shelters and other facilities on the land, and began to spend the months between October and May every year on it. “We needed to stay on the land during those seven months to guard the fish against stray animals, and change fish angles on the line,” Sab said. “We would cook, eat, sleep and wake up there.” But in 2016, the Karnataka Public Works, Ports and Inland Water Transportation Department sent eviction notices to around 60 of these seasonal migrant families, including Sab’s, stating that the land they were using belonged to the department.
Sab and 27 others approached the district court, challenging these notices. The court directed the district collectorate to conduct a survey to determine who owned the newly emerged land. The survey concluded that the land belonged to the port department, and that Sab’s land now lay under the sea, 1.2 km away from the newly formed sand pit.
A year-and-a-half later, the district collector ordered the demolition of all structures that had been built on the newly formed land, including fish-drying sheds, temporary shelters and other facilities that belonged to the families. Soon after the order was issued, the port department cleared the area of all these structures. The department then built a wall on the land to mark out a compound; it also began constructing a coastal road using part of the land, linking it to the nearest highway. Fisherfolk raised objections to the road project at local government offices, and filed a petition against it at the National Green Tribunal. They argued that the area was a turtle nesting site, and was thus ecologically sensitive. Further, they argued that the port department had not obtained clearance from the state’s coastal zone management authority before starting the road work. The department argued that in 2013, the newly emerged land had been notified as a port area under the Indian Ports Act, 1948, and that this classification placed it outside the purview of laws that limit construction activity in coastal areas. In September 2023, the National Green Tribunal ruled in favour of the department and disposed of the petition. The loss of Mallukurva and the accretion of new land near the village is part of a much broader phenomenon of coastal erosion, which affects all of India’s coast, and is particularly pronounced in Karnataka. Between 1990 and 2016, India lost 235 square kilometres of land to coastal erosion, of which, 28%, or 66 square kilometres, fell in Karnataka.
Researchers predict that such erosion in coastal Karnataka will intensify. “Warmer temperatures are leading to stronger and wetter storms,” explained MD Subhash Chandran, an ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and a member of the Karnataka Coastal Zone Management Authority. “These, combined with sea level rise, lead to more destructive storm surges with unusually high tides that can cause coastal flooding. Due to sea level rise, the waves can go further inland on beaches and erode them.” The change in the coastline is already quite stark: one study of changes in coastal land between 1990 and 2016 found that more than 22% of Karnataka’s 300-km coastline was “under erosion”.
Residents of villages like Mallukurva experience further distress and confusion as a result of conflicts over new land formed by material deposited by the sea. The phenomenon is not unique to the village: government reports note that between 1990 and 2016 India gained 231 square km of land through a similar process of accretion. But, Indian policymakers have yet to fully address these complex problems that result from the interplay of coastal erosion and accretion. In 2021, the 15th Financial Commission Report recommended that the Centre and state governments “develop a policy to deal with the extensive displacement of people caused by coastal and river erosion”. Soon after, in 2022, the National Disaster Management Authority announced a draft policy for the rehabilitation and resettlement of those displaced by erosion. The proposed policy does not address the question of accretion, but acknowledges the need for mitigating erosion and rehabilitating people displaced by it. It also recommends that affected communities be consulted on these matters, and that displaced households should be granted ownership of land to which they are relocated, along with a comprehensive rehabilitation package. The policy, however, remains in draft form, and is yet to be finalised.