LOSING GROUND
WHEN DESINGU WAS BORN, in 1967, there was a wide beach opposite his village, facing the Bay of Bengal on the outskirts of Chennai. By the time he turned ten, the beach had shrunk so much that the waves crashed near his home. So Desingu’s family and others in Nalla Thanneer Odai Kuppam—or NTO Kuppam, as the locals call it—dismantled their thatch-roofed huts, collected their belongings and moved a few more metres inland.
A few years later, the sea had come even farther in. Desingu’s family and their neighbours moved again, then again and again—four times in all. Some homes were abandoned to the sea. Sitting under the roof of a roadside temple one summer morning in 2019, Desingu stared at the tiny beach where his village once stood. “As erosion happened, line by line we had to shift inwards,” he told me. “Our old houses probably have fish in them now.”
On the last of these moves, in 1990, NTO Kuppam was squeezed onto the small strip of beach that remained between the sea and a coastal highway connecting to the nearby Chennai Port. As families grew, many had to build new homes on the other side of the highway, against the walls of giant cylindrical tanks put up to store imports of edible oil. In 2011, the residents were warned of a port-led project to widen the highway. They were told to leave, and offered flats in apartment blocks to be built by the state government as an effort at rehabilitation. Desingu’s family and around a hundred others refused to go, saying they had no money to pay rent elsewhere and that fishing—their only livelihood—would be difficult if they did not live by the sea.
Desingu’s life had always revolved around the beach, like the lives of his forefathers did. They sat on the shore watching for fish, and at the first sign of them raced to their boats, pushed them into the water and set out to cast their nets. When they returned, they sorted their catch on the sand, dried their nets and folded them back into their boats. The day’s work done, they walked to their homes on the beach to a meal of fish and rice. Desingu and his neighbours knew no other way. Even their boats were made for beach life, designed to be parked on the sands and unsuited to the concrete jetties of fishing harbours, which are meant for larger fishing vessels such as trawlers.
One evening, in 2017, police and bulldozers arrived unannounced. “They said, ‘Ready, charge,’ and demolished everything,” R Rajamanickam, Desingu’s elder brother, said. “They gave us no time to take our belongings.” With their homes gone, the families first lived under makeshift tents at the site, then gradually found rooms to rent. Some, like Rajamanickam, had to move some twelve kilometres away to find affordable accommodation.
Desingu, now in his fifties, is lean and rarely smiles. He comes to the beach every day to look out for fish—the water moves in a particular way when they arrive, he told me. Rajamanickam travels to the beach too, across the dozen kilometres, to join his brother and friends and to fish in their traditional waters. Their boats are tied to the shore at the spot where their village once stood.
The loss of their old homes left many fisherfolk families poorer. Their work demands odd hours and sometimes multiple trips to sea each day, which makes distance from the coast a problem. “Each fish has its specific time,” Desingu said. “We come and go accordingly. Sometimes we go at 12 am. Sometimes 3 am.” His friend Gunasekar, who had joined Desingu on the lookout, did not have a vehicle of his own and paid twenty-five rupees each way for a shared autorickshaw between his home and the beach. This cost alone wiped out at least a tenth of his daily income.
“Some days we come back with nothing,” Rajamanickam said. “If we make a lot of money, it’s around five hundred rupees for a day’s work.” After rent—around two and a half thousand rupees each month—and other expenses, they are left with very little.
Gunasekar told me he had two daughters but was paying school fees for only one. He was putting in extra hours fishing in the hope that he could send his second daughter to school too. “We’ll be happiest if we are given land right here on the beach,” he said. “We are used to community living. The people were our own. When someone harassed our girls,
