Governments like victims. Distressed people make for thankful recipients of public largesse. Within a week of Uttarakhand’s watery disaster of June 16 and 17, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister announced a Rs. 5 crore relief in solidarity with the “Government and people of Uttarakhand.”

This generous gesture stands in stark contrast with the way the Chief Minister is dealing with people in her own state who are concerned about their increased vulnerability to natural disasters. Around the time that she handed out her cheque to Uttarakhand, 19 fishermen from Sulerikattukuppam, a hamlet about 40 km south of Chennai, begged their way to bail after spending a month in prison. They were arrested for demanding relocation and rehabilitation; the celebrated 100 million litres per day Nemmeli seawater desalination plant constructed by Chennai Metrowater had triggered severe sea erosion and brought the sea dangerously close to their homes. The highly toxic brine rejects were polluting their seas.

In June 2011, when I visited the village, erosion was already at an advanced stage. Sandbags had been thrown at the waterline – a puny attempt to thwart the sea. The foundations of a community hall used by the fisherfolk to mend nets stood exposed and eroded. The hall was built by the Rotary Clubs of Chennai and Mumbai after the tsunami. Sulerikattukuppam was to be a model fishing village. “At that time, the sea was far away,” says P. Jagan, an artisanal fisherman. “All that was beach,” he said with a sweep of his hands covering a 50 metre expanse of water.

Between June 2011 and now, two cyclones – Thane and Nilam – have battered the coast. “Had the sea been where it used to be, with the beach separating us, we would have been fine.” All community structures constructed by the Rotary now lie in ruins, with boulders dumped alongside to retard the sea’s inexorable landward march.

With the sea at spitting distance from the village, the handpumps in the hamlet now bring out only salt water. The high-tech desalination plant was not only turning seawater into freshwater. It was also turning freshwater saline.

The erosion is now creeping northwards, eating into the beach of Nemmelikuppam, nearly 1.5 km away. A 2012 assessment conducted by Chennai-based Community Environmental Monitoring group estimates that up to 12 acres of beach, including nearly 70 metres in front of Jagan’s house had already been swallowed by the sea.

When the plant was first proposed, fisherfolk protested. They worried that the marine structures built for sucking in seawater or discharging wastewater will trigger sea erosion. They were right.

But the wisdom behind the fisherfolk’s protests was brushed aside. Protestors were brutalised by the police. Experts nominated by the Ministry of Environment and Forests cleared the project. Scientists averred that there would be no detrimental or unmanageable environmental consequences. The drone of the institutionalised expert drowned the rustic wisdom of the subaltern.

Jagan is despondent. The Government has announced a 150 mld desalination plant in his village. Another 300 mld plant is to come up in Pattipulam, 4 km south of Sulerikattukuppam.

Come October, if the cyclones hit this part of the coast, Sulerikattukuppam is bound to get it bad. Perhaps then, the Tamil Nadu Government will extend a compassionate hand rather than the police batons it is wielding now.

Reverse osmosis desalination plants are electricity intensive. They are usually considered in places with low rainfall and plentiful energy. Chennai is a city with plentiful rainfall, averaging about 1200 mm, and scarce electricity. Indeed, the districts of Thiruvallur, Chennai and Kanchipuram had an intricate network of lakes, tanks and ponds that trapped the monsoon waters, and recharged aquifers.

From Thiruvallur to Nagapattinam, the coastal plains have a rich variety of sprawling natural waterbodies – the Pulicat Lake, Ennore Creek, Pallikaranai marshlands, Kovalam and Muttukadu backwaters, the Odiyur lagoon and Mudaliyarkuppam estuary, the Kaliveli-Yedayanthittu-Vennangupattu estuary complex, Pichavaram mangroves and the Cauvery delta. They were capable of absorbing any shock that unpredictable monsoons could throw at it. But these are under threat.

Thirty years ago, the Pallikaranai marshlands draining the Western and southwestern suburbs of Chennai had a water spread of 6000 hectares. Today, it has shrunk to less than 600 hectares. It has been eaten into by roads, a garbage dump, the IT corridor, a slum rehabilitation colony, elite gated communities, engineering colleges and institutions like the National Institute of Ocean Technology that provide advice on everything from climate change, ocean behaviour and marine engineering. Pallikaranai’s role as a flood mitigator cannot be overstated. City planners, though, argued that for the city to develop, portions of the waterbody had to be sacrificed.

Unlike human laws, which can be violated with impunity by people with the right connections, natural laws demand unflinching obedience. For every violation, retribution is certain. Uttarakhand is evidence of that.

Heavy rains by themselves may not have caused so much damage in the absence of other exacerbating factors. The rains have reportedly washed away 800 bridges and caused more than 1000 landslides. The use of explosives to access mountainsides for construction, including on roads and dams, deforestation and the dumping of debris on water courses – all in the name of development — have converted a natural event into a national disaster.

In November-December 2005, Chennai suffered three flooding incidents. The last one crippled the suburbs upgradient of Pallikaranai. The Government blamed it on unusually heavy rainfall. But S. Raghavan, former deputy director general of Meteorology, says there is nothing unusual about heavy rainfall during the monsoon. “In 2005, the total rainfall of that season was 774 mm and was spread over three weak cyclonic depressions. 1946 witnessed far heavier rains – 819 mm – and there was no flooding.” Unwise land use that blocks natural drainage courses and prevent rainwater from seeping into the ground are what caused the flooding, he says.

Ditto with the 2004 tsunami. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India observed that violation of “CRZ [Coastal Regulation Zone] norms leading to overcrowding along coastal areas played a major role in loss of human lives and property during tsunami.” It also noted that the “Ministry [of Environment and Forests] had amended the CRZ Notification and the range of amendments presented a trend that had allowed commercial and industrial expansion in coastal areas.”

Such unwise land-use will prove dangerous in the warmer years to come. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that mean sea levels could rise by upto 44 centimetres by 2070. That will inundate low-lying areas, and bring the sea closer to existing coastal habitations. India’s climate action plan notes an increasing trend in severe storm incidence along the Indian coast. A recent study by Chennai-based Centre for Development Finance assessed the economic impact of a 1 metre sea level rise on Tamil Nadu’s coast. They reported that such a rise will permanently flood 1091 square km, and put 6 times as much land at risk. The replacement value of infrastructure such as ports, thermal plants and major roads could exceed Rs. 50,000 crores, while land at risk at present market value could exceed Rs. 61 lakh crores, and ecosystems services foregone due to degraded wetlands will translate to Rs. 14,608 crore lost.

It appears, though, that the writing on the wall is invisible. Rather than scale down climate changing activities, India is on a carbon binge.

Krishnapatnam port is in Nellore district in coastal Andhra Pradesh, abutting Tamil Nadu. Here, the Environment Ministry has cleared 8 coal thermal plants totalling 14,300 MW. Another 19 projects totalling 12,815 MW were in the pipeline in 2011 when Hyderabad-based Cerana Foundation reported on the subject.In Tamil Nadu, the Environment Ministry has cleared 27,440 MW of major coal-fired coastal thermal plants in just five districts, according to a compilation done by doctoral scholar K.V. Preetha of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. When operational, they will burn 102 million tonnes of coal each year. Together, they will suck about 6 billion litres of seawater each day and discharge a major fraction of that as hot and polluted water into the sea. Most of the plants will also construct their own captive ports and jetties. These will lead to shoreline erosion to the North of the structures, and accretion to the south.All these plants are designed to burn imported coal. However, even hard-core coal peddlers like Australia are doing a serious rethink about coal. An Australian Government-sponsored study titled “Critical Decade 2013” is unequivocal: “Burning all fossil fuel reserves would lead to unprecendented changes in climate so severe that they will challenge the existence of our society as we know it today. It is clear that most fossil fuels must be left in the ground and cannot be burned. ”

Climate change aside, plants like the 4000 MW Ultra Mega Power Plant in Cheyyur, Kanchipuram district, or the 3600 MW IL&FS unit at Cuddalore are located at highly sensitive spots. The Cheyyur plant is surrounded by waterbodies, including the biodiverse Odiyur lagoon, the Kaliveli tank and the mangrove-studded Yedayanthittu estuary complex on the other. Because of the abundant fish availability in the lagoon and nearby Mudaliarkuppam estuary, these waters are a favourite haunt for migratory birds and bird enthusiasts. The vast water spread areas also absorb monsoon floodwaters with ease.

The captive port for this plant is to come up atop a sprawling sand dune near the Panaiyur Periakuppam village. Flattening the dune would accelerate salinity intrustion, and construction of the port would drastically alter a shoreline that is already classified as prone to erosion by a Ministry of Environment & Forests study titled “National Assessment of Shoreline Change.” Experts at the Ministry, though, have cleared the project without verifying claims by the company that there are no sensitive ecosystems nearby, no sand dunes and “negligible” number of migratory birds.

The IL&FS plant too will have a captive port barely 2 km North of the Vellar estuary. The shoreline changes triggered by this port will block the river mouth for several months in the year, if not perennially. If that happens, the Pichavaram mangroves which depend on the flushing facilitated by this estuary will be doomed.

The dominant notion of development manifests itself as more power plants, desalination plants, roads, dams, rockets, malls, bombs, faster cars, glitzy malls, buildings where buildings were never ever meant to be, empty seas, poisoned rivers and deforestation. Development’s collateral damage, the argument goes, must be acceptable to us. Otherwise, we would not have development.

Local communities are told that they would have to be the proverbial eggs that would need to be cracked for the sake of the greater common omelette. As the Uttarakhand disaster has once again highlighted, more and more of the cracked eggs are ending up not on our plates but on our faces.

[Nityanand is a Chennai-based writer and social activist.]