Less than 100 km south of Goa, Karwar is a scenic town in coastal Karnataka along India’s western coast. In the wee hours of the morning, when the temperature is balmy and the fresh air leaves a mixture of salt and sand on the skin, fisherfolk dot the 3-km pristine beach lining the town’s western side. They stand next to their anchored boats, untangling fishing nets after the end of early morning labour. Around 10,000 fisherfolk depend upon the Karwar fishing harbour at the southern end of the beach, according to estimates by local community leaders. And Karwar is the perfect place for the job. The beach here is what scientists call a sheltered one as it is flanked by small islands. The islands slow down the waves, turning them from ferocious to the kind that roll off the sand with a whoosh. This sheltering effect makes the water a haven for fish to thrive in. Fisherfolk find bountiful catch here without having to venture too deep into the Arabian Sea. The small islands surrounding this beach make it a bay with plenty of catch, said local marine biologist Prakash Mesta. Next to the fishing harbour stands the 28-year-old natural, all-weather Karwar port. The commercial port is set to be expanded at a cost of Rs 1,993.54 crore ($298 million) under the Ministry of Shipping’s port modernization and development program, Sagarmala. The Rs 6.01 lakh crore ($79 billion) program, which began in 2015, has identified 574 projects across India. New ports will be built and old ones, such as the one in Karwar, will be expanded. After the expansion, the Karwar port’s annual capacity to handle cargo is expected to increase from the current 3 million tonnes (MT) to 4.5 MT, according to project documents. The port expansion can lead to an increase in air pollution, risks oil spills in the water, and may permanently alter the land around the port, the documents show. The Karwar port currently occupies three hectares of land, roughly the size of five football fields, according to this January 2020 Karnataka High Court order on a petition that sought to bring the expansion to a halt. The expansion is approved on another 17 hectares, according to project documents, or nearly six times as much land as it now stands on, and will encroach on the adjacent fishing village of Baithkol, home to over 6,000 fisherfolk, according to local leaders’ estimates. Among them is Sadanand Malshekar, a slightly built man who speaks softly. The 62-year-old told IndiaSpend that he learned fishing from his father as a teenager. This is what he has been doing for over four decades now. He stopped work for over a week to protest the Karwar port’s expansion in January 2020. The expansion, put on hold by the Karnataka High Court (HC) shortly after the protests, threatens the only way of livelihood he knows. India’s coastal regulation zone (CRZ) notification recognizes the right of fisherfolk such as Malshekar to the coast but gives the authority to regulate development along the country’s 7,500-km long coastline to the central and state governments. Getting permission to construct along the coastline is a complicated affair, and one that puts indigenous communities with limited resources at a disadvantage, according to Vinod Patgar, a Karwar-based enviro-legal coordinator with the think-tank Centre for Policy Research (CPR). In recent years, the right to grant permissions for most projects along the coastline has been delegated to the state governments; there is no central database where states reveal how many CRZ projects they have approved on their respective coasts. India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has given environment clearances (ECs) to 506 of the 540 proposed projects that sought approval and were accepted under the Infrastructure and Miscellaneous + CRZ category from July 2014 to June 1, 2020, according to publicly available data on the ministry’s Parivesh website. This is an approval rate of 93.7%. What makes the expansion of Karwar port stand out is that Karwar’s coastline was designated as one of India’s 13 Critically Vulnerable Coastal Areas (CVCA) in order to protect the critical coastal environment, according to the central government’s January 2019 CRZ notification. This designation meant no new project or expansion of old projects were to be permitted here. At the same time, local communities were to be involved in managing the coastline, a recommendation that the Karnataka state government disregarded 11 months later, in December 2019, when it approved the port expansion, the HC’s January 2020 order shows. It will take 21 years, in the best-case scenario, before the Karwar port will have enough traffic to utilize the new infrastructure it is putting in place, as per official documents examining the environmental impact of the port expansion project; flexibility to improve the project’s viability has therefore been recommended. IndiaSpend reached out to Devendra Kumar Rai, the director of the Sagarmala project, to understand the need for the expansion of the Karwar port. We will update this report when we receive a response. Port-related and other construction activity on Karwar beach have caused considerable damage to the beach ecosystem in Karwar, the HC’s order cited above shows. The dredging activity in the port has already led to a decline in the fish catch in the past few years, said CPR’s Patgar. IndiaSpend reached out to Prasanna Patgar, deputy conservator of forests and regional director (environment) for the Karwar region, who is responsible for granting CRZ clearances. This report will be updated if and when he responds on why the port expansion project in a CVCA was approved. The story of the Karwar port’s expansion is one that highlights the debate between the need for conservation and economic activity. It is also a story of local jobs coming under threat and of local communities getting disempowered in favor of projects considered beneficial for the nation’s growth…. Port: An economic need Around 95% of India’s merchandise trade by volume passes through sea ports, according to government data. In terms of cost, transporting goods through waterways is more economical than doing so by roads or railways. India plans to invest Rs 100 lakh crore ($1.3 trillion) over the five years to 2025-26 to develop roads, including 2,000 km of coastal and land port roads, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in the budget for the year 2020-21. These roads will connect ports to major cities and mining areas, facilitating transport of resources and goods. India currently has 12 large and 205 small functional and non-functional ports. Cargo traffic at major ports in the country was reported to be 699.05 MT for financial year 2018-19, even as cargo traffic handled stood at 585.72 MT (until January 2020 for 2019-20), said Gayathri Iyer, junior fellow, strategic studies, Observer Research Foundation. It is important for India to invest in its maritime infrastructure to be able to attract direct port calls to its shores, Iyer told IndiaSpend, and not be vulnerable to geopolitical risks emerging from Chinese investments in Colombo’s Hambantota mega-port and Pakistan’s Gwadar mega-port. The Sagarmala programme is aimed at accelerating economic development in the country by harnessing the potential of India’s coastline and river network, according to the central government’s Sagarmala National Perspective Plan. It is estimated that the programme will create 4 million jobs. Under the programme, 48 port projects are planned to come up in Karnataka at an estimated cost of Rs 24,772 crore ($3.2 billion), Nitin Gadkari, Union transport minister who also oversees the shipping ministry, had announced in March 2018. These, Gadkari had said, would include projects to modernise existing ports, improve connectivity and develop coastal areas. Karnataka’s 300-km coastline has one major port, the New Mangalore Port, and 12 minor ports. This means the state has one port every 23 km, on average. Of these, Karwar is the only all-weather port. The sheltering effect of the coastline that makes the Karwar harbour ideal for fisherfolk is also the reason why this area is ideal for a port, according to project documents. When the waters along India’s western coastline get choppy during the monsoon months (June – September), the sheltering effect of the Karwar coastline helps ships stabilise as well as navigate. Industry observers like Iyer say that emphasis should not just be on building new ports, but on increasing capacity of existing ports in green ways. This is a sentiment echoed by the Karwar port authorities as well; they believe the expansion at Karwar is in line with the larger vision of Sagarmala. This [Karwar] port mainly caters to northern Karnataka, Captain C Swamy, director of Ports & Inland Water Transport (IWT), Karwar, told IndiaSpend. It is strategically located. Since there is no expansion here [to handle additional cargo], most of the cargo of Uttara Karnataka goes to the New Mangalore Port [to the south] or the state of Goa [to the north]. Karwar port will need more breakwaters and jetties to accommodate more ships, said Swamy. The depth now is 8.5 m. We will have to deepen it to 14 m so that bigger ships can dock at the port.