Coastal info system to help counter erosion

Developed by the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M), the stations have been set up in Devaneri in Tamil Nadu, Ponnani in Kerala and Karaikal in the Union Territory of Puducherry, officials said.

The CMIS stations have been designed to generate field data on tides, waves, currents, wind, shore and seabed sediments, bathymetry and shoreline changes, which are important parameters to be considered for any planning and development.

R Thangamani, Director, Central Water Commission, Kochi, said the system was presently up and running, and the commission will be expanding it to other maritime states as well. In 2016, the IIT-M was assigned the responsibility of setting up the CMIS stations in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry through a tri-partite Memorandum of Understanding between the states and the CWC.

Three professors of IIT-M’s Ocean Department V Sundar, SA Sannasiraj and K Murali developed the project. “By this year-end, all the three stations would have completed gathering data in their areas for one whole year. Public works departments, Fisheries Department and ports would be the direct beneficiaries of the data generated,” Sannasiraj said.

According to a 2017 CWC report, all the maritime states/UTs face coastal erosion in varying magnitude and about 45.5 per cent of the total Indian coastline is under erosion threat. Among them, around 740 km of Andaman and Nicobar Islands coastline faced the highest erosion in the country, followed by Gujarat and Daman and Diu (486.43 km), the report said.