Rocking the boat for the ship 

Vadhavan coastal village faces displacement due to the construction of a major port, sparking environmental and livelihood concerns.

About 140 kilometres from Mumbai is a coastal village called Vadhavan, where about 200 houses, mostly with Mangalorean tiles, are built along an arterial road. There are paddy fields, mango and chickoo trees, and the ocean is about 100 metres away. Suru trees on the beach prevent sand erosion.

On June 19, the Union Cabinet decided that a port would be constructed here, across 17,471 hectares, impacting several villages in Palghar district of Maharashtra.

The all-weather offshore deep-draft facility, under the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority (JNPA), will cost about ₹76,220 crore. By 2029, it is slated to annually handle 23.2 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units, a measure of cargo-handling capacity). It is the 13th major port in India and Maharashtra’s third.

“Once it is operationalised, fishing activity will be banned within a 12-nautical-mile radius (about 40 sq. km),” says Narayan Patil, 70, a Vadhavan resident. As a journalist for 50 years, he first heard about the then-proposed port in the early 90s. “As I began to dig more, I understood that it would displace entire villages,” he remembers.

He launched one of the fiercest campaigns to protect the area almost three decades ago and is the president of Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, formed in the late 1990s, which fights in the sea, in the streets, and in India’s courts against the building of the port, slated to be one of the world’s top 10 in terms of capacity.

The people of Vadhavan and 29 other villages in Palghar district are grouped under the Vadhavan Bandar Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti that has the support of 12 other associations. They fear that construction will destroy the coastline and the biodiversity of its waters, adversely impacting fishing — the lifeline of the communities here.

Fear and foreboding