Manjula goes blogging...

After Kuala Lumpur I went to Pondicherry, or Pondy as it is called by residents. I hadn’t been home in 7 years and among other things I was particularly curious to see how much the town had changed. Certainly, the hustle and bustle in this quiet former French colony had increased, but what surprised me was the loss of beach along the town. I remembered a long stretch of substantial beach where we would collect bivalves buried in the sand to feed fish in our marine tanks or search for guitar fish that would wash up with the waves at night. The fishermen would haul in their nets and sort through their fish on the beach and place their traditional fishing catamarams up on the sand to go fishing early next morning. Now that beach has completely disappeared.

This beach erosion has been caused by a recent port built just south of Pondy. The breakwaters at the harbor entrance hinder the natural movement of sand by winds, currents, and the seasonal monsoon, resulting in a pile up of millions of tons of sand south of the breakwaters. Apparently the engineers for the harbor project had foreseen the problem and installed a sand dredger that would pump sand continuously onto the eroding northern side of the harbor. However, the Pondicherry Port Dept. took over the project and the sand dredger was never put to use - as a result, the pipelines have rusted and the submarine tunnels flooded. To put a band-aid on Pondy’s beach problem, the government placed large boulders along the seafront, but with the loss of natural sand barriers offshore, there is little to mitigate or dissipate wave energy, especially during storms and cyclones. The boulders will soon be washed away and the sea wall along Pondicherry’s seafront is in danger of collapsing.

Fishermen who can no longer fish from Pondy in their traditional, non-mechanized boats have now taken to removing and selling mussels and structures around the Pondy piers that all supported a rich marine life. I have never heard of sea turtles nesting in Pondicherry, though the occasional olive ridley nests on the beaches north of the town and eggs are sometimes sold in the Pondy market.

Fortunately, the beach problem is not completely irreversible and some friends are working hard to restore Pondy's charming seafront.

(1984 photo credit: Mitra et al. 2001)