CHENNAI: Fishermen and residents living around 14 fishing hamlets between Lighthouse to Kottivakkam have decided to vote only for the contestant who would assure them of lobbying for scrapping the East Coast elevated expressway, which they claim will destroy their livelihood.
"Now that the lists of candidates are finalised by the political parties, we have decided to meet them and tell them that only those who can assure us to scrap this project will be voted to power by us," said Radhakrishnan of Olcott Kuppam. "There are about 8,000 families in these 14 fishing villages and we have finished preliminary discussions with our community to be united in sensitising the candidates to lobby against this project," said Parthasarathy, panchayat leader of Urur Kuppam.
The fishermen claimed that their livelihood would suffer as they would have no open space to dry their nets and catch. Apart from that, activists, ever since the proposal for the project was unveiled, had been stressing on the high environmental impact associated with the project. The impact seemed to have increased a lot more this year since the population of the Olive Ridley turtles, a highly endangered species nesting on the beach stretch where the project has been proposed, has seen a phenomenal increase, primarily due to the conservation activities undertaken by the NGOs.
"From 69 nestings identified in 2010 between Adyar Estuary and Neelangarai, the numbers have increased to 99 nestings this year on the same stretch. We are expecting to release about 10,000 hatchlings back into the sea this year," says Akhila Balu of Student Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN). The network, in the past 23 years since its inception, has released more than 1,10,000 turtles safely back into the sea. "All these turtles will only come back to the same stretch where they were born to lay their eggs. And all of these will be threatened once the expressway comes up. One, they will not hit the shores due to heavy lighting to be used. and two, even if they do, their hatchlings will only move towards the light and not towards the sea and die in the process," added Akhila. After years of persistence, the SSTCN finally achieved their goal last year through a GO calling for mast lights to be switched off along the nesting areas to prevent the death of hatchlings. "All these efforts will go in vain when the expressway comes," added Akhila.
