The Hindu : National : Digha in peril

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 28, 2005

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National

Digha in peril

By Marcus Dam

KOLKATA, JAN.27. It may need no natural calamity to wipe Digha, West Bengal's most popular sea-resort, off the map; steady erosion along its shores should do it, unless immediate remedial measures are taken.

"Such a disaster could happen within the next few years,'' the chairman of the Digha-Shankarpur Development Authority (DSDA), Ananda Deb Mukhopadhyay, said here. Erosion along a 20-km stretch of the coastline of the Bay of Bengal has been severe over the past few decades. Waves have taken 15 to 20 metres each year at the more vulnerable spots. Anti-erosion project

"The DSDA has submitted an anti-erosion project with an estimated budgetary outlay of nearly Rs. 33 crores'' to the West Bengal Government, Dr. Mukhopadhyay said.

"What is required is an integrated coastal management scheme involving all the State departments concerned to protect Digha and other parts of the State facing the sea,'' he added.

The sea resort, 145 km southwest of Kolkata, has considerable tourist traffic and nearly 400 hotels. "A large chunk of these hotels are located in the Old Digha area, which has reached a saturation point and where the DSDA has placed a moratorium on new construction,'' Dr. Mukhopadhyay said.

Various shore protection measures have been tried on the eroding stretch of the Digha beach over the past 50 years, none of which has proved effective, according to a report compiled by experts, which had earlier been submitted to the West Bengal Government. These measures included the planting of casuarina trees on the sand dunes. "But this was not enough to stop the shoreline retreat," the report states. "The next attempt, undertaken by the State's Forest Department, was the piling of locally available wooden logs at close intervals but this proved to be a failure within a single season.''

Subsequently, the Irrigation and Waterways Directorate, based on advice from the Central Water and Power Research Station, Pune, built a sea wall along more than 3,500 m in the most vulnerable area of the coastline.

"But, though the sea wall prevented the sea from encroaching on the Digha township, the beach-lowering and deepening continued,'' according to Dr. Mukhopadhyay. Moreover, there have been several instances of over-topping of the wall during the rainy season and severe tidal activity has caused significant damage in sections of the wall.

Sand accumulation

A fishing harbour located on a small inlet at adjoining Shankarpur is also threatened owing to sand accumulation at the mouth of the inlet — another feature of beach morphology along the Digha coast.

"Already fishing trawlers cannot be navigated to the harbour during low tide and recurring accumulation of sand could well compel the authorities to consider the fishing harbour as abandoned,'' the experts' report warns.

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