Ezhikkara, a low-lying panchayat on the northern edge of Ernakulam’s backwaters, is drowning slowly — not in rainwater, but in the tides. “Every day, between November and May, we check when the tide will come in,” says MS Ratheesh, president of the Ezhikkara gram panchayat in Paravur taluk. “The water rises from within the land, not from the seaside anymore. Salinity is close to 30 ppt — almost equal to seawater. Nothing grows here now.”
In this cluster of estuarine villages ringed by the Vembanad Lake — a Ramsar wetland and India’s longest backwater stretch — saline water now seeps into homes, fields, and wells for half the year. What were once fertile Pokkali paddies, known for their salt-tolerant rice and prawn farming system, have turned barren. Of the 400 hectares of Pokkali fields Ezhikkara once cultivated, only about 70 remain active today.
“This is the panchayat with the highest youth migration in the district,” Ratheesh says bluntly to TNIE. “People are leaving. You can’t fight the tide with bare hands.”
Ezhikkara’s geography defines its fate. The panchayat—barely 350 meters wide in parts—is cradled by Vembanad on three sides, with the Arabian Sea just 5 km further west, separated only by Vypin island. Here, the lake behaves like a living lung: inhaling saltwater during the dry months and exhaling fresh monsoon flows through 10 rivers that descend from the Western Ghats.
“This region is a biodiversity jewel,” explains CG Madhusoodhanan, chief executive officer of Kochi-based EQUINOCT, alongside KD Vincent, chair of the panchayat planning committee and a long-time community leader. “The Chalakudy river alone has 140 species of fish, more than the Ganga. Ten rivers drain into Vembanad, enriching it with freshwater and silt. But decades of sand mining, dredging, and urban encroachment have changed everything. The depth that was once 8 meters is now barely 2 in many stretches. The lake is fast losing its ability to sustain life.” As the sediment builds up, tidal energy pushes farther inland. The delicate rhythm between the kadal, kayal and kandal — the sea, backwater, and mangrove ecosystem — is collapsing. In Ezhikkara, even the palms along the shore are dying. “The salt now climbs the roots,” Ratheesh says, pointing to a row of skeletal coconut trees. “They were never affected before, not even when salinity touched 20 ppt. Now it’s touching 30 and above.” In response to the creeping crisis, local researchers and communities have taken mapping and prediction into their own hands. Since 2022, EQUINOCT Community Sourced Modelling Solutions and the Community Resource Centre Puthenvelikkara have co-developed a web-based tidal flood forecasting application called “Seasight” that places local observation at the centre of early warning.
Residents were given printed “tidal calendars” to record the time and depth of water entering their homes each day. “We distributed 10,000 calendars across coastal Ernakulam,” said Madhusoodhanan. “Every 5 cm rise in tide level was mapped against its real-world impacts —how many houses, roads, or fields get inundated.”
The data, cross-checked with elevation maps, feed into a digital dashboard. “It allows us to predict which areas will flood when the tide hits 1.6 metres or 2 metres,” Madhusoodhanan explains. “It’s a community-sourced early warning system that merges science with lived experience.” The dashboard is designed to send alerts to panchayats so residents can move belongings, protect livestock, or temporarily relocate when a high-tide event is forecast. It is cost-effective and can be easily replicated in all the coastal districts, if the government wishes, he told TNIE.
Marine biologists call the Vembanad backwaters the nursery of the sea — where juvenile fish, prawns and crabs once thrived. “That nursery is gone,” says Vincent. “Fishers tell us their Chinese nets stay empty for weeks. Invasive jellyfish have taken over; they indicate low oxygen and poor water quality.” It’s not just the ecosystem that’s choking. “The livelihoods of more than a lakh people depended on these waters — fishers, Pokkali farmers, and small traders,” Vincent says. “Now, even the fish are migrating elsewhere before the temperature rises due to low depth.” Sumitra Nair, a doctoral scholar in sociology and anthropology at Ashoka University, has been documenting the social fallout of these changes. She calls the crisis a “collision of natural and human-made vulnerabilities.”
“The problem is not just sea-level rise — it’s the sum of dredging for ports, sand mining, unplanned urban expansion, and the loss of mangrove buffers,” she explains. “These anthropogenic pressures have accelerated what might have been a gradual process. In less than 20 years, a resilient wetland ecosystem has become a slow-motion disaster zone.”
The Pokkali system — a heritage farming model unique to coastal Kerala — is both an agricultural and ecological innovation. During the monsoon, farmers cultivate tall salt-tolerant rice varieties in flooded fields; after harvest, the same fields are opened to the tides for prawn and fish farming.
“It’s a dance between the moon and the monsoon,” says Vincent, who comes from a Pokkali-farming family. “The sluice gates are opened not by machines, but by the rhythm of the tides. The fields need the sea, but only in balance.”
That balance is now broken. “Salinity stays too high for too long,” says Ratheesh. “We used to get freshwater from the rivers during rains — now even that flow is blocked or delayed by upstream dams. Without that dilution, the soil has become sterile.”
Farmers who once grew vegetables and millets on the higher garden lands around the paddies have given up. “Everything wilts now,” Ratheesh says. “Kerala imports most of its vegetables from Tamil Nadu, even though this land was fertile just 20 years ago.” Ezhikkara’s plight mirrors the wider crisis of the Vembanad ecosystem. Covering 100 kilometres and stretching across Ernakulam, Alappuzha and Kottayam districts, the lake is India’s third National Waterway and a hub of economic activity. Its shores are lined with ports, shipyards, industries and tourism infrastructure.
“The dredging of navigation channels for port access has deepened the estuaries, removing natural sandbars that once acted as buffers,” Nair notes. “This allows more seawater to rush in during high tides.”
Data collected by EQUINOCT shows that tidal flooding has intensified rapidly since 2018, when Kerala’s devastating monsoon floods altered the region’s hydro-morphology. “The highs are higher now,” says Madhusoodhanan. “Sea-level rise explains part of it, but the human alterations have multiplied the impact.”
Despite the data and community mapping, the state has yet to officially recognise tidal flooding as a natural disaster. “We’ve prepared a detailed project report and submitted it to the government,” Ratheesh says. “It’s been five years — no one has even visited.” The report pegs the cost of essential mitigation works, including embankment strengthening and flood regulators, at over ₹320 crore for the panchayat alone.
For Vincent, the lack of action reflects a deeper problem: “The system sees disasters only when they are fast and visible — a cyclone, a landslide. But tidal flooding is slow and invisible. It doesn’t break suddenly; it seeps.” Ezhikkara’s future now hinges on restoring that lost equilibrium — by reviving Pokkali farming, regulating dredging, and letting the community’s own flood maps guide decisions. The mapping work led by EQUINOCT, combined with the voices of local leaders and scholars, is already changing how people perceive risk: not as a distant policy problem but as a lived, charted and shared reality.
