Sea level rising alarmingly; West Bengal bears brunt with 60% coastline erosion
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, December 21: The climate change is giving a telling blow to the coastline of India. While small island nations are facing existential threat, coastal states such as West Bengal and Kerala are losing land to the sea at a greater speed.
Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Science & Technology Jitendra Singh told Parliament on Wednesday that the recent report from Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC-AR6 WG1) has noted that the global mean sea level has been rising at an unprecedentedly rapid pace in recent decades. In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha, Singh said that the average sea level rise increased from 1.3 mm/year between 1901-1971 to 3.7 mm/year between 2006-2018.
The minister further stated that the National Centre for Coastal Research (NCCR), Chennai an attached office of the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), is monitoring the shoreline erosion since 1990 using remote sensing data and GIS mapping techniques. He added that 6,632 km long Indian coastline of mainland has been analyzed from 1990 to 2018.
“It is noted that about 33 per cent of the coastline is under varying degree of erosion, 26 per cent is of accreting nature and the remaining 41 per cent is in a stable state. The observed changes may be induced by natural processes, including sea level rise and anthropogenic activities,” added the minister.
West Bengal which has a coastline of 534.35 kms has seen 60 per cent incidents of erosion. Puducherry with 41.66 kms of coastline has seen 56.2 per cent incidents of erosion. Kerala with 592.96 kms of coastline has seen 46.4 per cent incidents of erosion. Gujarat which has 537.5 kms of coastline has also seen 27.6 per cent incidents of erosion during the state period of the observation, the government t informed the Lok Sabha.
Singh said that the Cyclone Warning Division (CWD) at India Meteorological Department (IMD), New Delhi acts as a Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre for monitoring, predicting and issuing warning services on tropical cyclones developing over north Indian Ocean. “IMD has three Area Cyclone Warning Centres at Chennai, Kolkata & Mumbai and four Cyclone Warning Centres at Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Thiruvananthapuram and Visakhapatnam for carrying out operational warning activities at state level and to carry out related research and development activities,” added the Minister.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who represents Thiruvananthpuram in Kerala, has on occasions raised the issue of the state losing land to the sea because of erosion.
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