Coastal Regulation Zone, 2018

The article by Preeta Dhar “Contested Coasts: The Draft CRZ Notification, 2018” (EPW, 18 August 2018) critically discusses the disengagement of the public in the formulation of the new 2018 Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification. In response to the same, this article desires to vindicate the author’s arguments with some key evidences from the fieldwork conducted in Pulicat, a coastal village situated in Thiruvallur district in Tamil Nadu for a period of two months.

A total of 13 villages are located on the northernmost east coast line of Tamil Nadu and are separated from Andhra Pradesh by a 200 metre (m) bar mouth in between. This opening to the sea is significant for the livelihoods of the local fishers, the ecology of the Pulicat lake and the entire drainage of Thiruvallur district in Tamil Nadu. The 13 villages on the coast are sandwiched between the sea on the one side and the Buckingham canal on the other, thereby bounded between the high tide lines on either side making them highly vulnerable to any form of even the slightest of disasters, both anthropogenic and natural. There are a total of 36 villages located in the Pulicat revenue village according to the data collected from the office of the Pulicat village administrative officer (VAO) that are under the administrative jurisdictions of four different panchayats—Light House, Kottaikuppam, Thangal Perumbulam and Pazhaverkadu with a highly dense population of 27,680 people and 6,920 households.