CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu will come out with its own Coastal Zone management plan once Ministry of Environment and Forest completes the mapping of Coastal Regulation Zone One as well as High Tide Line.
R Ramesh, director of Chennai-based National Center for Sustainable Coastal Management, an autonomous body of Ministry of Environment and Forest, told Express that the process to map CRZ-1 and High Tide Line is on the verge of completion and everything is likely to be in place in the next six months.
“Once CRZ-1 and High Tide Line is mapped then states will be coming up with a state costal zone management plan,” said Ramesh during the sidelines of Multi-Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on Coastal and Marine Zone Management organized by M S Swaminathan Research Foundation.
The CRZ-I consists of ecologically sensitive areas. These include mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass, salt marshes, protected areas or reserve forests besides horse shoe crab habitats, turtle nesting sites and bird nesting sites. It also includes geomorphologically important areas, which include sand dunes, sandy beaches, mudflats and inter-tidal areas besides heritage and archaeological sites.
He said that all these would be mapped in a digital format. He said the high tide line, the line on the land upto which the highest water line reaches during the spring tide, is also being mapped so that it could be used as a baseline for development as well as conservation activities along the coast.
“Both have been mapped aerially by the Survey of India,” he said. Ramesh also said the hazard line along Indian coast is being mapped by taking into account erosion and flooding of the coast.
It is being demarcated as the most landward boundary taking into account water level fluctuation, sea level rise and shoreline changes (erosion and accretion of the coast).
The water level fluctuation is being recorded by Tidal gauges. “Earlier we had only 10 to 12 tidal gauges now the water fluctuations are being studied by 200 tidal gauges,” he said.
The mapping of CRZ-1 as well as hazard line is being done when over 40 per cent of the Indian coast is eroding, much higher than previous estimates. Earlier, M A Atmanand, Director, National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai, who spoke during the inaugural session, called for sustainable solutions along the coastline.
"There is need to maintain a balance between sustainable development and environmental protection." Defending the introduction of hazard line, noted scientist M S Swaminathan said that the 1991 notification sought to regulate all developmental activities in the inter-tidal area and within 500 metres on the landward side without any scientific study.
He said it failed to take into account that the Indian coastline is highly diverse in terms of biodiversity, hydrodynamic conditions, demographic patterns, natural resources, geomorphological and geological features.