Coastline set for digital mapping……Shalini Nair
With the Centre issuing the revised draft Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification last week, the state environment department has decided to roll off the process of digitising maps detailing Maharashtras 720-km coastline.
The digitised maps will serve as a reference point and will be compared to live satellite images to deal with complaints pertaining to encroachments, destruction of mangroves, extensive sand mining and violations of coastal norms. We were waiting for the draft notification before carrying out the digitisation to be clear about the Centres definition of CRZ. Now that the notification maintains that CRZ will continue to be the coastal stretches within 500 metre of high tide line on the landward side, we will immediately start off the four to five month process, said State Environment Secretary Valsa Nair-Singh.
Maps detailing the coastal stretches of the state, also known as the Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP), were finalised and approved by the Ministry of Environment and Forest in 1996. The CZMP for urban areas, on the scale of 1:4000 (1 cm on map for every 40 m on ground), was prepared by the Thiruvananthapuram-based Centre for Earth Science Studies. For rural areas, the work was done by Ahmedabad-based Space Applications Centre (SAC) on a scale of 1:25,000. Both these agencies are among the six accredited by the Central ministry, the other four being the National Institute of Oceanography, Institute for Ocean Management (Anna University, Chennai), Institute of Wetland Managemen t and Ecological Design (Kolkata) and Survey of India (Dehradun).
Depending on availability, the six agencies will be roped in to digitise the CZMPs for four of the five coastal districts in the state- Thane, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg. For Mumbai city and suburbs, the BMC is already working on detailed maps to track their underground utilities which can be used by us, said Singh adding that digitising the map will allow government agencies to zoom in to the minutest scale which could be as little as 1:100. The digitisation would be followed by actual surveys. Whenever there are complaints about infringement of coastal rules, we will procure satellite images from the governments Nagpur-based Remote Sensing Applications Centre and compare it to our digitised maps to keep track and act against violations from time to time, said Singh.