Fishers at bay

When it was introduced in 1991, Coastal Regulation Zone was a blanket notification to protect India's coast and fisherfolk. In 17 years, it was amended--diluted to favour industry--21 times. Now, a new line of management rules might give industry a free run at the cost of fishing communities and environmental concerns. An analysis

A fter 30 years as fishermen, Madaka and Mohan Majhi in Orissa are wondering where they might find new jobs. "It is difficult because fishing is all we know," said Mohan. Prawn farms have mushroomed along the shore and affected fish population. "Our catch has declined, from 10 kg earlier to barely four kg a day now," said Madaka who, like Mohan, uses a small wooden boat to fish in the sea off Maharudrapur village in Balasore district.

The Balasore-Bhadrak belt in northeastern Orissa has seen intensive prawn farming over the past seven years, which is illegal.India's Coastal Regulation Zone 1991 (crz) allows such activities half a kilometre from the sea's high-tide line; the prawn farms are within 75-100 metres. The Majhis said they find it difficult to bring their boats back to the shore. "We anchor our boats in the shallow on-shore waters and walk up to the shore with our catch. This takes time and affects the quality of the catch. Earlier, one kg hilsa fetched Rs 300. Now, we get around Rs 200," Madaka said.

Down south, Tamil Nadu has a fisherfolk population of about 800,000 along its 1,076 km coastline. There are plenty of industry, tourism and construction projects along the coast. "Several are in the pipeline. This will wash us out," said K Bharathi of the South Indian Fishermen's Welfare Association. crz has become effete, he added. When crz was notified in 1991, the idea was to regulate activities in coastal areas and demarcate safe distances for projects to come up along coasts. It was amended 21 times and each time the rules were relaxed, activists and fishers allege, it was done to accommodate developers' interests.

After protracted protests, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, in 2004, formed a committee to look into the loopholes in the regulation. It asked the committee to come up with possible solutions. Four years later, on May 1, 2008, the ministry released a draft of the notification, which it called the Coastal Management Zone notification or the cmz.

cmz has stirred a hornet's nest. About 100 fisher representatives from nine coastal states gathered in Delhi in early November. They said the notification was an open invitation for industry to flourish and it would drive fishers away from their land.

A ministry official termed the protests unnecessary. "We have received over 8,000 comments and given ourselves 10 months to vet the remarks. The new notification will not be issued before June 2009," an official of the ministry said, but on the condition of anonymity. Environmentalists who have studied both crz and the cmz draft said that the Indian coasts would now be open to plunder.

Key differences between CMZ and CRZ

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Genesis and features of CMZ vis-a-vis the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification 1991

Key features
Coastal areas categorized as

--CMZ I ecologically sensitive areas like coral reefs and mangroves

--CMZ II coastal municipalities, panchayats with more than 400 persons per sq km, ports, tourist areas and special economic zones. Cities like Mumbai will become part of this zone

--CMZ III open areas including coastal waters, excluding those classified as CMZ-I, II and IV

--CMZ IV inland territories of Andaman and Nicobar, Lakshadweep and other offshore islands

The draft defines coastal zone as one that includes "the area from the territorial waters limit (12 nautical miles measured from the baseline) including its seabed, the adjacent land area along the coast and inland water bodies influenced by tidal action, up to the landward boundary of the local self government or local authority abutting the sea coast..."

Make setback lines along the coast. It would be a line demarcated on the coast based on its vulnerability to sea-level rise and other hazards

Provision of a 32-member National Board for Sustainable Coastal Zone Management chaired by the Union Minister of Environment and Forests

Problem areas
Alleged by activists who have studied the draft notification

Zone categories (CMZ-I,II,III,IV)
Setback line
Monitoring CMZ
Fishers' livelihood

After 17 years
February 2005 Union Ministry of Environment and Forests' 13-member committee headed by M S Swaminathan reviews Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification and gives recommendations

September 2006 New legislation, based on Swaminathan committee recommendations, underway, says environment ministry

August 2007 No new coastal legislation developed, says ministry. If there was need for such a regulation, the ministry would draft it, ministry officials say in response to a right to information application. But activists manage to get an unofficial draft of the notification titled Coastal Zone Management, 2007

August 2007 onwards Demands to withdraw draft notification

October 2007 Ministry introduces concept note on the draft notification

November 23, 2007 Half-day meeting in Mumbai to discuss the concept note. Several objections are raised and the meeting concludes abruptly

May 1, 2008 CMZ Notification, 2008, released officially. Comments, objections and suggestions sought within 60 days

May 9, 2008 Ministry publishes amendment to the notification airport projects to be allowed on a "case to case basis"

July 2008 Ministry appoints Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad, to hold consultations

Aug 2008 Consultations in all coastal states

Sept 27, 2008 Last date for receiving comments on notification

CMZ, a blessing in disguise for CRZ violators?
Orissa's track record in implementing the CRZ notification is abysmal. Records suggest there are over 63 CRZ violations in the state. A lot of them are in the form of roads, beach properties and hotels. Along the Balasore-Bhadrak coast, prawn culturists rule the roost. Over 800 hectares (ha) in the Balasore-Bhadrak belt is under prawn culture, with an annual turnover of around Rs 60 crore.

Almost half of this farming violates the CRZ notification because it is done without leaving the 500 m distance from the high-tide line as specified in CRZ 1991. Lured by the prospects, businessmen from Balasore bought land in coastal villages for prawn culture. Subsequently, pollution became another issue.

Ramesh Nayak, one of the biggest prawn farmers of the area, admitted to discharging the water from his ponds into the Gomei river, a tributary of Baitarani.

"I started out in 2000 with less than one hectare and today I have over 16 ha under prawn culture. The water is pumped into the river and nobody bats an eyelid," he claimed. But the state's environment department had not received any complaints against such farms, said Bhagirathi Behera, director of the department. It is feared that these irregularities may be regularized considering the state is all for the new notification.

CRZ should be strengthened, said D P Rath, regional coordinator of Centre for Environment Education, the agency that organized national consultations. "It would be better to take some more time and review and refine the 1991 notification instead of coming up with something new like CMZ," said Rath who was in charge of the consultations in Orissa.

In coastal Tamil Nadu, 58 CRZ violations were registered between 1998 and 2008 but the number could be higher, said R Annamalai, director of the state's environment department.

Activists claimed it is common for developers to begin construction without clearance and then seek exemption. "CRZ is being scrapped for this and CMZ being brought in," said V Srinivasan, president of the Chennai Metro Union, a labour organization. Most prominent, but alleged, cases include

Constructions in CRZ I, north of Adyar estuary in Chennai
Road in CRZ-II in Thiruvanmiyur area of Chennai
State public works department constructing the governor's bungalow less than 20 metres from the high tide line on the Elliot's beach in Chennai
Elevated highway planned from Marina to Kottivakkam
Construction of a coastal road from Chennai to Kanyakumari in the pipeline
In Palavakkam, a CRZ-III area, Madras University has allotted sites for its staff on the beach
In Injambakkam panchayat, a CRZ-III area, farmhouses have come up within 20 metres of the high tide line
Shrimp farms in Nagapattinam.

CRZ to CMZ: A setback or a ste (Credit: Surya Sen)

The question is whom to manage and what to regulate

An official of the environment ministry said that the new notification is better because it is site specific. "It ensures planned land use on the coast, protects ecologically sensitive areas and lifestyle of fishing communities. India's coast is diverse--ecologically, in terms of population density, and land use patterns. A law that treats the entire coast as a single entity is certainly weak. crz did exactly that," he said.

The 500 metre no-development zone in crz was arbitrary, he added. "Take the case of Mumbai, where it makes no sense to insist on such a zone. Because of population pressure, the zone gets encroached upon, turns into a slum and adds to the pollution load."

But, criticisms are many for the new notification.

Failure of crz notification is of the ministry's own making, said Pradip Chatterjee of a non-profit in Kolkata. "Over 300 cases of crz violations are yet to be heard in various courts in the country. Rather than strengthening the existing law, the government has introduced a much weaker piece of notification," he said.

Fishing community leaders apprehend cmz will legalize all crz violations. In that case, it will be after taking into account the social aspect, said another ministry official.

"Someone has invested time and money in building a house, even if by flouting the rules; it seems hard to tear down that structure. Perhaps it should be left to the courts to decide on such matters," said the official.

Critical of the ministry's approach, Sudarshan Rodriguez of ATREE (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment) in Bangalore said he had studied the notification and that ATREE, along with the Pune-based Kalpavriksh, had documented the sequence of events that led to the cmz notification (see box Run-up to cmz). "There is no logic behind categorization of areas under the new four coastal management zones. We are sure the rationale of vulnerability while demarcating zones is overridden by economic interests," said Rodriguez.

It does not have any deadline by when identification of the areas should be done, he added. No-development zones have been dropped in cmz, paving the way for large and polluting projects such as ports, airports, mining and power projects, alleged Rodriguez.

CRZ limits scrapped
In place of no-development zones, there are provisions for setback lines and vulnerability mapping in cmz. The idea behind such concepts is to study India's coastal belt and divide it into various zones depending on various factors. Setback line would be demarcated on the coast based on its vulnerability to sea-level rise and other hazards.

It would replace the 200 m and 500 m no-development zones of the crz notification. These are limits beyond which development activity is regulated or not allowed.

The setback line would ensure that beach erosion does not worsen and protect buildings and investments--housing, roads or plantations--by locating them away from the zone of probable worst-case erosion, a ministry official said.

The Swaminathan committee's report recommended seven parameters for mapping vulnerability of the coast

elevation
geology
geomorphology
sea level trends
horizontal shoreline displacement (erosion/accretion)
tidal ranges
wave heights.

Non-profits alleged the ministry had further diluted the recommendations.

"Only four parameters--elevation, geomorphology, sea level trends, horizontal shoreline displacement--would be considered... against the seven in the Swaminathan Committee Report," reads the ATREE -Kalpavriksh report. The report also alleged the ministry disregarded three parameters because the quality of data on these was poor and development of a usable database for the prediction of vulnerability would take at least two to three years.

A ministry official said that the ministry was using scientific parameters followed worldwide to draw the setback line. It was planned earlier that work on demarcating the setback line would begin next year but the ministry has started work on it, with help from what it calls scientific experts from the World Bank. Orissa, West Bengal and Gujarat have been chosen for this project.

"The detailed project report is being prepared. We have, on our own, demarcated a setback line for Nellore in Andhra Pradesh, Paradip in Orissa and Dahej in Gujarat. The next phase will cover Mangalore, Navi Mumbai and Nagapattinam," the official said. Details of the setback line projects are not available to the public.

The National Fishworkers' Forum is sceptical of the government's plans. "Even after 17 years, the ministry of environment and forests has not been able to demarcate the high tide line; how will it map the setback line in two years?" questioned the forum's chairperson Harekrishna Debnath.

Threat to livelihood
The worst sufferer as a result of the cmz notification will be the Indian fishing community that is being pushed away from the coast, said N D Koli, general secretary of the National Fishworkers' Forum in Mumbai.

"The intent behind the notification was to secure fisherfolks' traditional rights but it has proposed just the opposite," he said. For instance, the notification states that coastal panchayats with more than 400 persons per sq km shall be declared cmz -II areas. This means many of the earlier crz -III (mostly fishing villages) categories would now become cmz-II.

The notification restricts new settlements in cmz- II areas by allowing them only on the landward side of the setback lines but allows other tourism and recreation facilities on the seaward side of setback lines, said Debnath.

The new notification has also removed no-development zones from cmz- III areas. According to the notification, water sports and recreation activities, agriculture and horticulture, treated effluent discharge facilities, greenfield airports, integrated port, bridges and sea-links, mining and shipbreaking are allowed on the landward side of cmz -III.

"It is not desirable to include mining sites and power plants that would have serious adverse implications for both local communities and valuable marine resources. The list needs to be totally revamped," said E A S Sarma of Forum for Better Visakha, a non-profit in Visakhapatnam.

Koli added that the government was playing it smart by saying that it had not banned fishing activities in cmz areas. "Instead, it has allowed all kinds of polluting projects to come up on the Indian shoreline, which would translate into a polluted sea and no fish; hence no fishing and fisherfolk to deal with."

Activists said implementing the provisions would be far from easy because of lack of clarity on implementing agencies.


A CRZ violation Constructions next to the beach road in Thiruvanmiyur, Tamil Nadu

Over to local authorities
Responsibilities have been allocated to varied bodies such as village panchayats, urban local bodies, National and State Coastal Zone Management Authorities, state governments, scientific institutions and the central government itself. But, there is little clarity on how these bodies will execute their allocated tasks. There is no mention of any appellate system for disputes related to decisions taken by these authorities.

The major shift from the crz notification is the inclusion of local authorities. These would be responsible for regulating activities based on the integrated coastal zone management plan (iczmp) for cmz-I areas.

iczmp is defined as the land use plan or development plan prepared for implementation of the integrated coastal zone management. But, monitoring these activities have not been spelt out clearly.

Rodriguez called it a double-edged sword. "Whereas devolution of power seems positive, it makes sense only when an effective implementation and monitoring system is in place. The fact is such a thing is lacking in cmz notification. This may translate into more corruption at the local level," he said.

The draft notification proposes to set up a 32-member National Board for Sustainable Coastal Zone Management chaired by the environment ministry. The board's mandate is to "provide policy advice to the Centre on matters relating to coastal zone management, but shall not undertake regulatory functions". Environmentalists claimed the exact role of the board was not clear.

The draft notification also proposes a National Institute for Sustainable Coastal Zone Management, operational details, powers and functions of which have not been detailed.

India