FROM THE STATES
Coastal Accumulation
in Tamil Nadu
Senthil Babu
S
even years after the 2004 tsunami,
with the coastal communities in
Tamil Nadu yet to reconcile with its
after-effects, another disaster is gradually
unfolding. A massive relief and rehabilita-
tion campaign, largely driven by private aid
with the state playing a mere regulatory
role, has opened up the coast for invest-
ment, making it a most attractive zone for
a new kind of disaster capitalism with
ultra mega industrial projects of ports,
thermal power plants and petrochemical
industries. An investment-led growth regime
is descending on the 1,076 kilometre-
long coastline spread over 13 districts of
the state.
In the district of Cuddalore alone, along
the 30 kilometre-long coast from Cud-
dalore Old Town to Parangipettai, roughly
about 8,000 acres of land have been ac-
quired since 2006 for an oil refinery, three
thermal power plants, one shipbuilding
yard, a textile processing unit with a com-
mon effluent treatment ­facility, and three
captive ports. The ­combined investment
in these projects will be about ­Rs 50,000
crore. South of Cuddalore, in the Sirkali,
Tarangambadi and Kizhaiyur talukas of
Nagapattinam district, which incidentally
saw the most ­intense post-tsunami reha-
bilitation efforts, three captive ports and
12 thermal power plants together produc-
ing 14,700 MW of power are planned in the
next three to five years. Further down, the
Tuticorin coastline is to be lined with 16
power plants with a capacity of more than
20,000 MW. Between just these three
districts Tamil Nadu would have about
50,000 MW of power-generating capacity
by 2017.
Land acquisition along the coast started
in 2006 and continued through the subse-
quent years even as the coastal zone policy
agenda shifted from regulation to man-
agement. With the state focusing entirely
on exercising its power of eminent domain,
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a brokerage class of political patrons,
organised along the lines of local lineage
and caste kinship, has emerged to substi-
tute for the state and mediate for capital.
This brokerage class also anticipates
­acquiring contracts for supply of labour,
transport, construction materials, etc. This
class works in combination with the state
machinery to ease the work of the state and
capital. For example, it identifies parcels
of land for the investor, goes from door
to door promising people jobs, and often
encourages revenue officials to open land
registration offices at midnight to ensure
instant transactions with farmers who
have just provided their “consent”.
New Politics, Old Tensions
Unlike before, when the political parties
competed with each other to take up
people’s issues, there is a new scenario
today where people have to form their own
collectives and run from pillar to post,
pleading and petitioning the political
parties to take up their cause. Farmers who
lost land formed such “grievance collec-
tives” which spanned class divides – in the
village of Panchankuppam in Cuddalore
district, the erstwhile mirasidar owning
more than 10 acres of land as well as a
widowed old woman with her 27 cents
were part of the same collective. Some
got relief from the judiciary while the
leaders of other groups cut private deals
with industry and left the landowners in
the lurch.
One of the reasons for the formation of
such collectives has been the need for im-
mediate organising to defend village com-
mons from the new enclosures. For in-
stance, the fisherfolk of Velingarayanpettai
village in Chidambaram taluk, Cuddalore
district, were shocked when they were
told that 159 acres of their common beach
land had been leased out by the Tamil
Nadu Maritime Board to the Good Earth
november 26, 2011  vol xlvI no 48  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly
Shipyard. In the neighbouring villages of
Panchankuppam and Karikuppam, the
IL&FS Tamil Nadu Power Company, pur-
portedly a public sector-sponsored special
purpose vehicle, has covered the irriga-
tion channels, the Buckingham Canal and
even a school playground, laying roads
on them for their heavy trucks. When
their brave ­efforts to protest through peti-
tioning, dharnas, picketing and hunger
fasts are blissfully ignored by the authori-
ties or countered by false cases being foisted
on them, they have worked out innova-
tive and yet age-old ways to block the en-
croachment of their commons. Often sub-
scriptions are raised to hire the excavator
JCBs to dig up roads and fields to stop the
trucks and cranes of the contractors from
entering their village.
Amidst all these struggles, further con-
tradictions emerge. Dalit marginal farmers
in the village of Kaarappidagai and the
adjacent Stalin Nagar in Kilaiyur taluk of
Nagapattinam district question the credi-
bility of the caste Hindu aquaculture farmers
in leading the local movement against the
proposed Tridem Port and Power Company.
They say it is aquaculture which destroyed
their irrigation system in the tail end of
the ­deltaic zone. Now since power plants
threaten aquaculture, these aquacultur-
ists have become leaders to oppose the
company. The dalit farmers say that when
they had protested against aquaculture,
they were harassed and beaten up by the
same people who now want them to join
the struggle against the power plant.
Tool for Appropriation
All the acquisitions of land have been
based on the formality of the public hear-
ings, which themselves are based on
the “Executive Summary” of the environ-
mental impact assessment (EIA) reports,
prepared by contractual expertise. Not a
single EIA ­report has mentioned the neces-
sity of a cumulative impact assessment
study on the entire Cuddalore coast, which
will have to carry three ports (six break-
waters), four thermal power plants with
their respective desalination plants, a tex-
tile processing unit, a shipbuilding yard,
along with an already existing industrial
cluster, the SIPCOT chemical complex. The

latter has been ranked 16th among the most
critically polluted areas in the country in a
study conducted by none other than
the Central Pollution Control Board.
The EIAs also blatantly lie. The EIA
report of the Good Earth Shipbuilding yard
claims that the fishermen of Velingarayan-
pettai panchayat fish only 10 kilometres
beyond the project zone and hence there
will be a zero impact on them due to the
shipyard. But this in a village dominated
by artisanal fishermen without a single
trawler. It does not care to mention the al-
ready present crises in the region’s fisheries,
with serious depletion of resources amidst
overcapacity and rising conflicts within
the community, a common scenario in the
post-tsunami fisheries in this part of the
coast. In the Perumalpettai fishing hamlet
near Tarangambadi (Tranquebar), the fisher-
folk have been at the receiving end of a
naphtha-based private power plant which
uses sea water as coolant and discharges
hot water back into the sea and thus has
destroyed the marine life resources along
this part of the coast, which has tradition-
ally supported about 4,000 fishing families.
When fisherfolk from this area try and
base themselves in the nearby Nagoor
port, they are being chased away and
there have been ­frequent clashes among
members of the fishing community them-
selves over fishing territory. This stretch,
if the proposed projects are implemented,
will soon have three power plants with a
total ­capacity of 3,680 MW, each with
their own desalination plants and a cap-
tive port under consideration, spread over
2,800 acres of land.
Legal violations are common too. The
fisherfolk of Velingarayanpettai village
decided to boycott the public hearing held
for the Good Earth Shipyard since they
were not even informed about the hearing
and no impact assessment report in Tamil
was circulated. The company paid Rs 500
per head to ­attend the public hearing.
However, the gathering became a stage to
mobilise public opinion against the credi-
bility of not just the EIA report but also the
very intentions of the government. The
people came to know at the hearing that
the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly in its
budget session of the previous year had
sanctioned the construction of a super-
phosphate factory by the same company
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   november 26, 2011  vol xlvI no 48
on the same premises as the proposed
shipyard. This information was passed on
by the local member of the legislative
­assembly who belonged to the Communist
Party of India (Marxist). Everyone, in-
cluding the district collector who was pre-
siding over the public hearing, was
shocked since the Tamil Nadu Maritime
Board’s lease agreement for the 159 acres
of common land to this firm and the
Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) clearance
clearly stipulate that the agreement will
be null and void if the land is used for any
other purpose. To add to the illegality,
it is the same department’s head who also
moved the resolution in the state assem-
bly, allowing the superphosphate factory.
The collector was forced to conclude the
hearing by a public announcement that
there was a unanimous opposition to
the shipyard!
The Struggles Continue
Since the 2004 tsunami, this coast has wit-
nessed numerous popular struggles and
campaigns. These struggles have been
against aqua­culture, against the displace-
ment of fishing communities beyond the
500-metre line immediately after the tsu-
nami by the then Chief Minister J Jaya­
lalithaa, against the M S Swaminathan
authored Coastal Management Zone rec-
ommendations and the CRZ Notification
of 2011. All these struggles were spear-
headed by the fishing community but it
appears that the challenge before the
entire coastal population requires a uni-
fied alliance of all communities – fisher
families, marginal agriculturists and
land­less labour along with several other
­occupational communities.
Such unity within the village seems to
fragment under pressure from the new
economic regime. The landed peasant
­incessantly looks for and constitutes his
own grievance collectives and sometimes
manages to get some compensation for
the land lost. The compensation ranges
from a few ten thousand rupees per acre
to, in rare cases, more than Rs 10 lakh per
acre, depending on the needs of the
project and the peasants’ negotiating
skills. The landless and the fisherfolk are
left with no choice but to realign them-
selves with these collectives led by the
landed peasantry, even if with guarded
FROM THE STATES
scepticism. They stay at the margins, yet
add to the numbers.
When these projects are justified in the
name of “national development”, it is com-
mon to hear opinions like “we” need power
or even that the alienation of the landless,
the fisherfolk and the marginal agricul-
tural classes is a necessary evil for the na-
tion’s progress. This vicarious nationalism
of such a “we”, which often tends to trans-
gress ideological boundaries fails to repre-
sent the alienated classes in any meaning-
ful democratic manner.
In a recent demonstration in front of the
Cuddalore collectorate demanding an end
to the appropriation of commons by private
capital and for a cumulative EIA by the
state through a credible, public ­institution
of science, some of the tensions mentioned
here were evident. One could almost touch
and feel the cautious, guarded sensibility
of the representatives of the affected villages.
Some of them were holding a microphone
for the first time in their lives and were
totally uncertain whether to use a chaste,
literary Tamil on a public platform or to
vent their anger in their own spoken Tamil.
Immediately after the event, after the col-
lector was petitioned, bills for the sound
system and the tent were settled with
frantic, desperate drives to collect Rs 4,000
from the assembled villagers. Then there
were several groups in a huddle discuss-
ing the latest news about deals cut at the
behest of “the minister” who already is
the benami contractor for supplying con-
struction material to a power plant. As we
were leaving Cuddalore, this minister’s kin
had beaten two youngsters who blocked
the trucks passing through their villages.
One more trip to the police station, demands
to file an FIR and back to the villages,
mobilising money to hire a JCB the next
day to dig out the road laid on the commons.
The struggle continues.
Senthil Babu (senjay@gmail.com) is a historian
of science and an activist working with
peoples’ movements in Tamil Nadu.
available at
Altermedia-Bookshop Ecoshop
M G Road
Thrissur 680 001, Kerala
Ph: 2422974
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