Firstly, the Orissa government has submitted a revised proposal for a port at Barunei Muhan in Kendrapara district to the Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF). The ministry had previously asked the state government to redraw the limits of the proposed port, as the site came within the Gahirmatha Marine Wildlife Sanctuary.<\/p>\n
Secondly, a lack of sufficient depth to the impact assessment has been cited as the reason for holding back the agreement to a captive port at Jatadhari, near Paradip, part of South Korean giant Posco\u2019s plan to build a US$12-billion steel plant at nearby Jagathsinghpur.<\/p>\n
Sanjiv Gopal, Greenpeace India’s Oceans & Climate campaign manager, told GreenPort<\/em> magazine that there are a number of problems associated with the port developments. \u201cFirstly, along Orissa\u2019s short coastline of 480km, there are a total of over 10 ports proposed, in addition to the two existing and operational ports at Paradip and Gopalpur, and the Dhamra port, which is currently under construction. This means roughly one port development every 40km.\u201d<\/p>\n The appraisal committee of the Coastal Regulation Zone panel has asked Posco to give additional information on the captive port, but the project is may also be running into trouble with it\u2019s forest clearance programme and this may also mean delays in approval by the environment ministry. Further, the panel is now taking on the need to make a \u2018cumulative assessment of projects. While Mr Gopal say that this is a positive step, as the developments present problems on a number of fronts – including to marine wildlife and the fishing industry – shoreline erosion is a \u201cmajor problem\u201d.<\/p>\n This, he says, shows up in the regions of Chennai, Ennore, Visakhapatnam and Paradip ports and Pudducherry Harbour, which has already suffered an extreme morphology due to the construction of breakwaters. But it isn\u2019t limited to this region, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cAt present, about 23% of shoreline along the Indian mainland is affected by erosion, and in Orissa, the coast north of Gopalpur port has already been badly affected \u2013 much of this erosion is actually down to artificial structures.\u201d<\/p>\n While he also says that the government is now mapping India\u2019s coasts with an eye to marking out problematic erosion areas, \u201cas they are not looking at what is causing the difficulties, there is a good chance that in 15 years you will find that places that were only classed as moderate risk are now classed as \u2018severe\u2019”.<\/p>\n Moreover, Mr Gopal explains, \u201cThe issue of the carrying capacity of the coastline with reference to developmental projects is completely missing. The proliferation of megaports near vulnerable areas has been a matter of controversy for some time now, from Dhamra on the eastern coast, to Mundra and Tadri on the west.\u201d There are currently over 300 ports proposed along the coast of mainland India, of which over 200 are in the notification stage. This would translate to roughly a port every 20-25 km, he adds.<\/p>\n \u201cThe premise for port expansion on this scale also needs to be questioned given that many existing major ports are currently under-utilised and operating below capacity\u201d Mr Gopal concludes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are a number of port proposals being turned over in Orissa at the moment, mostly related to mining shipments, an ongoing issue for India \u2013 but some are running into delays linked with environmental concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-greenport"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4321,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4319\/revisions\/4321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4319"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}