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Abstract:
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Urban developments have exerted immense pressure on wetlands.
Urban areas are normally centers of commercial activity and continue to attract
migrants in large numbers in search of employment from different areas. As a
result, habitations keep coming up in the natural areas / flood plains. This is
happening in various Indian cities and towns and large habitations are coming
up in low-lying areas, often encroaching even over drainage channels. In
some cases, houses are constructed even on top of nallahs and drains.
In the case of Kochi the situation is even worse as the base of the
urban development itself stands on a completely reclaimed island. Also the
topography and geology demanded more reclamation of land when the city
developed as an agglomerative cluster. Cochin is a coastal settlement
interspersed with a large backwater system and fringed on the eastern side by
laterite-capped low hills from which a number of streams drain into the
backwater system. The ridge line of the eastern low hills provides a welldefined
watershed delimiting Cochin basin which help to confine the
environmental parameters within a physical limit. This leads to an obvious
conclusion that if physiography alone is considered, the western flatland is
ideal for urban development. However it will result in serious environmental
deterioration, as it comprises mainly of wetland and for availability of land there
has to be large scale filling up of these wetlands which includes shallow
mangrove-fringed water sheets, paddy fields, Pokkali fields, estuary etc.Chapter 1
School 4 of Environmental Studies
The urban boundaries of Cochin are expanding fast with a consequent
over-stretching of the existing fabric of basic amenities and services.
Urbanisation leads to the transformation of agricultural land into built-up areas
with the concomitant problems regarding water supply, drainage, garbage and
sewage disposal etc. Many of the environmental problems of Cochin are
hydrologic in origin; like water-logging / floods, sedimentation and pollution in
the water bodies as well as shoreline erosion |