The Hindu

MANGALORE, May 7: The intermittent rainfall for nearly two days has loosened the wall of boulders that had been put up by the district administration at Ullal to protect the coastline from the vagaries of the sea.

It was noticed on Saturday that the retaining wall that had been built with loose boulders was slipping at Moghaveera Patna, Kotepura, Mukkacheri, and other areas. Residents of Mukkacheri told presspersons that this was not a new problem. Every year, more and more land was being lost to the sea, bringing the residents closer to rough waters, they said.

Unlike the last monsoon when the Moghaveera Patna area was worst-affected by the erosion, this year the threat seems to be greater at Mukkacheri. The boulders near a mosque there have slipped by over eight feet in some places, raising fears that once the monsoon intensified, the mosque and a few houses around it might suffer severe damage.

Siddique Kadapar, a community leader at Mukkacheri, said that the mosque’s glass window panes had to be replaced with fibre ones after they were shattered by the waves on Friday evening. Some residents there have started reinforcing the boulder wall with laterite bricks. However, the bricks that had been put earlier had turned to soil and gravel at several points.

No solution

The district administration has been dumping large boulders here during every monsoon for over three decades to protect the land from erosion. In the absence of any permanent solution to this annual threat, the administration is left with no option but to replace boulders that slip into the sea.

On June 8, 2008 the Minister for Fisheries, Ports and Inland Water Transport, J. Krishna Palemar, inspected these areas as they were facing the same threat then. Unlike this year, though, the monsoon was in full swing then. He announced a package of Rs. 2 crore as an immediate relief measure but nothing happened thereafter. In trying to have a permanent solution to the problem at Ullal, the district administration had proposed to set up a permanent blockade against the sea there. A draft proposal had been sent to the Asian Development Bank for a Rs. 291-crore project.

Ports Officer Captain Mohan Kudru told The Hindu that no progress had been made on the ADB project yet. Deputy Commissioner V. Ponnuraj said: “Any emergency at Ullal will be met with by using Calamities Relief funds. The State Government has to find a permanent solution for this problem.”