Once the size of 3 football fields, what happened to the Fort Kochi beach?
The town of Fort Kochi, which still carries remnants of its colonial past, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Kerala. Among the charming relics of its colonisers -- the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British -- which made this small town a global tourist spot, the beach in Fort Kochi with its iconic Chinese fishing nets and long walkway along the coast, adds to the beauty of the place. However, apart from being ridden with garbage, the coastline has been facing a major issue in the recent past—a rapidly shrinking beach. Though the issue has often been pointed out, the phenomenon still persists. However, the problem seems to be a recent one, as Fort Kochi natives recall the enormous shore that was once “the size of three football fields”.
Roy, a 60-year-old native of Kochi, is among the small populace of those who still remember how enormous the beach was in the 1980s. Talking to TNM, he jubilantly recalls the huge sandy shore. “The beach was a wide and long continuous stretch from the present-day Kamala Kadavu (where Chinese fishing nets are located). We could walk continuously up to the INS Dronacharya. It was so enormous that it was the length of three football fields.”
But unlike today, the region was not a tourist spot then, reminisces Roy. “In those days I remember the beach to be filled with fisher folk engaging in brisk activities from morning. There were no tourists apart from two or three who arrived from Ernakulam, crossing via the ferry. Though Fort Kochi had the colonial structures and people from Anglo-Indian community, the place was like a normal fishing village. Unlike today, there was not even a culture of domestic tourists coming to the beaches,” he says.
Man sitting near the narrow beach stretch near Chinese fishing net
It was in 1984 that the beach witnessed a cultural extravaganza, probably for the first time since the colonisers left. The United Nations Organisation had declared 1984 as the ‘International Youth Year’, and Roy was one of the youngsters who came together to hold a beach festival in Fort Kochi. “For a week, we held various celebrations in the beach,” he says about the remarkable incident, the success of which paved the way for the present-day Cochin Carnival which started from the very next year, 1985.
However, Roy’s is a story of a bygone era. The beach in Fort Kochi is now two separate small stretches, one at the south end of the walkway, near Old Bristow Lighthouse Hotel, beyond which lies the INS Dronacharya; and the other, larger stretch near the Bastion Bungalow. Most of the time, the beach is laden with garbage and sea weeds that get deposited on the shore, making it difficult for the public to enjoy even the small stretch of beach.
Year after year, with the beach reduced to the size of only a few metres, Kochi residents were even forced to shift one of the most famous events of the Cochin Carnival, the burning of Pappanji, that was held at the beach since the inception of the celebrated event.
So, what explains this phenomenon?
KJ Sohan, former Kochi Mayor and a resident of West Kochi, recalls the first time that he noticed the Fort Kochi beach shrinking, in his memory. “It was when the construction of Vallarpadam container terminal (International Container Transshipment Terminal) started,” he told TNM. The ICTT is located opposite the Fort Kochi beach, separated by the estuary made by the opening of Vembanad Lake to Arabian Sea. ICTT started construction in 2007.
“The spot where the ICTT is located now was mostly water. I think they have reclaimed over 700 acres of the water body for its construction. When they constructed a stone boundary wall, what happened is, the water coming to the sea from the Vembanad Lake started to be forced more towards the south side of the opposite shore -- that is, the Fort Kochi beach. Before that there was a free flow of water to sea,” observes KJ Sohan.
Destroyed walkway
“While we lost a lot of beach area after this, in the Vypeen region – the adjacent land strip near the ICTT -- almost 1,000 acres of land were formed,” adds the former Kochi Mayor.
Following this, when Cyclone Ockhi hit the Kerala coast in 2017, Fort Kochi witnessed major coastal erosion again. This resulted in the further shrinking of the beach and the destruction of the walkway near the south beach, which remains in a dilapidated condition till date. During the 2019 monsoons, the area witnessed further erosion of the beach.
Erosion accelerated by human activity?
A childhood memory of Roy’s suggests that it could be a rotational phenomenon that expands and shrinks the Fort Kochi beach. “During the 1970s, I remember my mother taking me to the Fort Kochi Basilica Church for the festival there when I was eight or nine years old. After the festival, she took me to the beach and she made a remark that many years back the beach was much larger. She was disappointed at how it had shrunk. After that, it was in the 1980s that I remember seeing the beach to have expanded again,” he says.
Roy also observes that the beach started to erode when dredging became frequent in the later years. But based on his mother’s remark, Roy speculates that the fact that beaches erode and expand over a course might be natural. However, it could have accelerated in the recent past due to human activities like dredging.
Dr KV Thomas, former Director of the National Centre for Earth Science Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, tells TNM that human intervention has a heavy toll on the existence of beaches. “Once, of the close to 600 km coastline of Kerala, about 540 km was sandy shore but now it is not. When we build structures like sea walls, there will be end erosion. When structures like groynes are built, there will be erosion in the down thrust side,” he says.
While INS Dronacharya has about seven such groynes or breakwaters, the Fort Kochi beach also has a few. While the walkway in Fort Kochi is located above a sea wall, KJ Sohan notes that islands opposite Fort Kochi, like the ICTT, also have stone walls.
Government intervention
While scientific intervention is the need of the hour to restore or slow the pace at which the beach is shrinking, even comparatively minor works in the beach remain undone. An example of this is the walkway which got destroyed during Cyclone Ockhi that still remains in a dilapidated condition.
After beach was cleaned by Cochin Heritage Zone Conservation Society last week
According to official sources, the Tourism Department has deployed IIT Madras to conduct a study so that walkway can be built scientifically. While the scientific approach is appreciated, there are also criticisms. Recently, a team from IIT Madras had visited the spot for a preliminary survey.
“The recent visit of the IIT Madras team was at a cost of Rs 25 lakh. When there are scientific experts who can do such studies in Kerala, why spend this much money on them?” the official in Ernakulam tells TNM.
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