Podampetta in Odisha is an undisguised warning about ‘development’
As our car wound through the dusty, narrow mud lanes of Old Podamppetta, the dilapidated houses screamed a bygone time of when it was populated by the fishing community. It was common to find children playing on the beach, women with shiny bangles and radiant nose rings salting and drying fish on the platforms and men dragging their small boats back to the shore after a good catch of fish. The present scenario of concrete ruins pickled with the massive wet trunks of uprooted trees and wailing of a few stray dogs leap at you like a scene from some horrifying apocalyptic movie. The eerily haunting feel is hard to shake off. The roar of the Bay of Bengal which is now only 50 metres away from the decrepit decay of what used to be a bustling village sounds menacing. It lies in wait to swallow whatever is left.
The massive coastal erosion has led to the damage of the houses and infrastructure leading to the resettlement of the community to New Podampetta, 300 metres away. One cannot even begin to imagine the mental anguish that the people would have undergone when they realised that the land they had inherited from their ancestors and the life that they had so painstakingly built over the years will be snatched away from them by the sea which is the source of their livelihoods and way of life. They had to choose survival over familiarity and comfort. They had to rebuild their lives from scratch in the resettlement area. For the adults of the community, who had grown up watching the sea each and every day from their childhoods, the sea was an inextricable part of their lives. They do not like the fact that they cannot catch the sight of their beloved sea from their new houses, in stark contrast to earlier times when the sea was ever present in every moment of their lives. They miss the rise and fall of the tides as well as the continuous distant rumble of the waves which is both soothing and evokes a sense of the ocean’s vastness and power.
Earlier, they could see the schools of fish leaping around in the sea water and immediately took out their nets and boats, rushing to catch them. Life was predictable and familiar. With the relocation and commencement of the ban on fishing for seven months of the year to protect the breeding sites of Olive Ridley turtles, most of the men have migrated to other parts of India and abroad for livelihood opportunities. The community now consists of mostly women, elderly parents and young children. The youth do not have any intimacy with the sea, and the young men are eager to explore their fortunes in cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi where they can work as pipe fitters, etc on a bond for two years. Young girls continue with higher education but job opportunities in nearby areas are rare. Everyone in the community realises that their old way of life is rapidly slipping by. The familiarity and the inseparability of the older generation with the sea is absent in the youth today. The relocation has put a distance between the sea and the people and their way of life, which was heavily influenced by the sea. The dispossessed community has lost the anchor in which their values, customs and culture are rooted. The mental and emotional stability that comes from being rooted to your place of origin is missing in the youth, leading to a slow stripping away of their old identity. The youth, in particular, is in an uncomfortable transition of not belonging to the old times and yet not being sure of the identity that they want to forge in current times. They do not want to go away to faraway places, but the dearth of jobs is forcing them to. They no longer are a part of the sea folk but do not want to go away from it either.
Indiscriminate anthropomorphic activities have only served to disturb the balance in nature leading to global warming, sea level rise, pollution, shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, etc which affect the already marginalised and vulnerable communities. This trip to Podampetta, a coastal village in Ganjam, Odisha is a painful reminder of how vulnerable humans are to the vagaries of nature. It also serves to reiterate the fact that the feigned obliviousness of a few powerful communities across the world can doom the future of the entire humanity. In the name of development, the exploitation of nature has gone on for far too long. Even as world leaders pay lip service to environmental protection, they have actively weakened the environment protection agencies in their countries. Donald Trump officially withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change during his first term and the Environmental Protection Agency is actively rolling back environmental regulations. In India, 100 acres of forest cover in Kancha Gachiowli, Telangana were flattened by the State for developmental activity in April. This unhinged drive towards rampant “development” which serves the interest of only a few and is not cognizant of the fact that nature does not depend on humans, but humans are completely dependent on nature. It will only accelerate the rate at which human civilisation is hurtling towards its doom.
The sea is waiting.
Sankalpa Satapathy is an Assistant Professor, Institute of Public Health Kalyani
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth