Orissa’s Dhamra Port project finds itself in the eye of a storm as environmentalists allege it threatens the habitat of the endangered Olive Ridley turtle, reports Anand Sankar

A hundred and fifty kilometres from Bhubaneswar, and seven kilometres north of the tiny fishing town of Dhamra, a rough, unpaved road ends in a beehive of construction. On the horizon, lights blink through the night as dredgers clear the way for a shipping channel. Close by at the sprawling site, engineers are working on giant conveyor belts that will become active when the Dhamra Port Company Limited (DPCL), a 50:50 joint-venture between Tata Steel and Larsen & Toubro, becomes operational next year.

Work is continuing on the port that, when ready, will handle ships that are classified as Super Capesize, that is, those ships that displace about 180,000 dead-weight tonnes (DWT). At 18 metres, Dhamra Port is laying claims to being the deepest port channel in India. Though currently, berthing facilities for only two ships are being constructed, the port master plan envisages “13 berths, capable of handling more than 83 million metric tonnes per annum of dry bulk, liquid bulk, break bulk and containerised cargo”.

If the plan comes to fruition, Dhamra might become the biggest port in India. Currently the ports handling the highest annual tonnage, according to the Indian Ports Association, are Kolkata, Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Mumbai and Kandla. Visakhapatnam maxed in 2007-08 at 64.5 million metric tonnes. It can handle six ships of up to 150,000 DWT, while boasting a channel whose depth is 17 metres.

That’s not why things don’t appear rosy for Dhamra Port. It was envisioned as early as the 1980s but concrete proposals trickled in only during the early 1990s. A concession agreement was signed between the Government of Orissa and International Seaports Private Limited (ISPL) on April 2, 1998 to expand and develop the minor port of Dhamra.

The period of concession from the official date of commencement is 34 years, after which the port reverts back to government ownership. In 1998, the East Asian economic crisis put paid to those plans. Tata Steel then entered into a partnership with L&T on May 5, 1999 to implement the project. The already delayed project finally got underway in 2005, but trouble lay across the horizon.

This time it is environmentalists who are leading the noisy protest. They allege the Dhamra Port will endanger the Gahirmatha beach, just 15 kilometres due south. This is one of the world’s largest nesting sites for the endangered Olive Ridley turtle. It is part of the Bhitarkanika National Park, the second-largest protected mangrove swamp in the country and home to another endangered species — the salt water crocodile.

Activists have raised three principal concerns: the impact of construction, and later shipping, on the mating activity of the turtles; the impact of erosion, as a result of the dredging work on the shipping channel, on Gahirmatha beach; and the impact of the port lighting on the turtle hatchlings.

According to the green activists, the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) of 1997 did not address these concerns, and the current version of the port is vastly different from that specified in the EIA. They demand that construction be stopped, and have filed petitions in the Orissa High Court. At the same time, talks began between DPCL and the gaggle of protesting NGOs — Greenpeace India, Wildlife Protection Society of India, Wildlife Society of Orissa, Conservation Action Trust, Prahlad Kakkar’s Reef Watch and Bittu Sahgal’s Sanctuary Asia.

While the 1997 EIA takes note of the turtle habitat, the missing link is a lack of research on the turtles, their deep water mating habits and their habitat to the north of Gahirmatha beach. “We have studied the nesting areas and the turtle activity offshore at Gahirmatha but not off Dhamra. Though there is no nesting activity on the shores north of Gahirmatha due to the muddy nature of the beaches, turtles (many species) are found in varying concentrations along every mile of India’s coastline.

What we need to study is the concentration of turtles off Dhamra and how they utilise the waters,” says B C Chowdhury from the Endangered Species Management Department, Wildlife Institute of India (WII). “We don’t say the port should not be built, but we need to do this assessment before possibly irreversible damage is done.” WII is a government institution under the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Chowdhury is accepted as an expert on wetland habitats and amphibians and has been sought out for his opinion duringdiscussions between DPCL and the activists.

Talks, which began in the hope of a solution, quickly turned sour. DPCL says it volunteered for an independent assessment of the port area but agencies such as the Bombay Natural History Society and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) refused, citing the commencement of the project as their reason.

Thus, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was roped in for its expertise in managing marine conflict. But this has also failed to convince the activists as they found the IUCN report focused on conflict mitigation during the construction and operation of the port but bypassed a revised preliminary study. Their demand is a fresh EIA. Talks finally broke down on February 20, 2009 with the protesters deciding on public action due to construction continuing at a rapid pace.

The most vociferous of the NGOs has been Greenpeace India that organised protests and bombarded Ratan Tata’s email and fax with petitions. “We want to publicise the fact that a group such as the Tatas, which claims the moral high ground on environmental concerns, has not done the due assessments,” says Ashish Fernandes, Oceans Campaigner, Greenpeace India. A spokesperson for the Tata Group, though, objects that the protests individually target Tata. The spokesperson insists he is only part of a firm that has a stake in DPCL and finds it unfair that the other partner in DPCL, L&T, finds no mention in the protests.

The Dhamra Port authorities say they are not insensitive to environmental concerns. “We have followed all requirements laid out in the EIA and we are implementing all the measures suggested by the IUCN. We acknowledge that a few turtles might be found in the waters. We are taking extreme precautions while dredging. We will install permanent shielding for our lights in the final phase of construction,” says Santosh K Mohapatra, CEO of the port project. DPCL has appointed an official to monitor the environmental parameters of the project and to share information with the relevant authorities.

The devil, as always, is in the fine print. Mohapatra claims that any suspension of work now to study the turtles will cause a loss of time and money. But he also reveals that the “official date of commencement” of the project has not been reached. This date is reached when the land acquisition process is complete, but the Orissa government is still at the task. The project needs 4,013 acres for the port and 3,000 acres for a new rail link. Thus, though the port concession is for 34 years, if the DPCL saves time on construction due to the commencement date being pushed back, it can technically enjoy a longer concession and claim construction finished “ahead of schedule”.

Though DPCL initially insisted that the most “stable” location for the shipping channel was chosen, it is alleged that here too the rules have been bent. “Conditional permission was given for dredging, pending surveys from competent agencies,” says B K Patnaik, chief wildlife warden, Orissa. “The surveys have been commissioned now, but the dredging began last year.” Mohapatra says that the initial dredging survey done by an American agency is good enough, but admits that the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) has been tasked to revisit the area.

“We do not want to disturb the surrounding morphology. We want a stable shoreline. It is a simple analogy — if our vehicle pollutes less, I get more mileage. The port is completely natural with the channel being flushed naturally by the outflow from the Dhamra river, and the Kanika Sands (a large sandbar about two km offshore) is a natural breaker. Even our piers are the dolphin type, that is pillars, to avoid littoral disturbance,” insists Mohapatra. On the issue of port lighting, while DPCL says it will implement all recommendations to ensure that the turtles are not affected, it has no responsibility to regulate any allied infrastructure, industry and development that comes up due to the port.
 

Fingers are pointing at the Orissa government for its alleged complicity in allowing the construction to begin without any safeguards. “The Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has held the environment portfolio close to his chest. He has so far refused to be a part of the discussions, nor answered any queries,” says Biswajit Mohanty of the Wildlife Society of Orissa. Mohanty wants the project scrapped.

He says permission for the relocation trawling to determine the density of turtles in the waters off Dhamra is still pending. DPCL insists it has asked for permission to do the trawling as it would “settle the case” but claims government permission has not been forthcoming. Sources in the forest department, who did not want to named, say the issue has been left to “hang in limbo” because it is feared “all hell” would break loose if the turtle density is found to be high.

Researchers working in the Gahirmatha area point to the disappearance of a part of the nesting islands called Nasi I and Nasi II, off Gahirmatha beach, to add weight to the erosion theory. This claim is corroborated by accounts from local fishermen. Verifying this is incredibly difficult as access to the island falls under the high-security zone around the DRDO’s Wheeler Island missile testing range. DPCL, meanwhile, argues that erosion is a constant phenomenon in the area and points to satellite imagery of the Nasis from 1999 to 2001, which shows them shrinking and growing. The forest department says the NIO is the authority on erosion.

Negotiations stalled at the environmentalist’s demand that construction be halted till a panel of scientists, to undertake a new study on turtles in the area, is decided upon. They reportedly asked for three months to decide on the panel, and expert Chowdhury says two years of research will be needed for a reliable study. DPCL says it is not in agreement about stalling work to deliberate on the names of scientists, but says it is agreeable to any suspension of work in the periods indicated by scientists. Some company officials, who did not want to be named, say they feel the environmentalists want to stall work enough to force a cancellation due to a cost overrun.

While the debate rages, the nesting season this year, which looked grim, appears to be ending with a silver lining. Dozens of volunteers and researchers have been watching the three main nesting beaches — Gahirmatha, Devi Mouth and Rushi Kulya. Devi Mouth has again been haunted by turtle carcasses washing ashore, after drowning in nets laid out by fishing trawlers. Rushi Kulya saw a brief mass nesting — called arribada (the Spanish word for arrival) — from February 14-17. At Gahirmatha, after a year's lull, the turtles slowly started arriving by March 20 for what was reported to be an almost normal arribada. This year's final turtle nesting count is expected soon.
 

Something to look forward to in the near future are the little turtle hatchlings who will pop out of the beach sand. Book your tickets to be at Gahirmatha or Rushi Kulya from the middle of April onwards.

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