Vulnerability of Coastal Population, Rights of Coastal Community and Legal Regimes in India

Coastal areas are one of the key systems for global sustainability. These are the transition areas between land and sea. Coastal regions gained importance because of multiple uses, like high productivity of the ecosystem, highly concentrated population, industrial friendly, waste disposal, tourism, transportation, strategic planning in the military, and many more. These coasts are always in a dynamic state trying to change, and nature always works to maintain the equilibrium. India, with its most diverse ecosystem, high productivity, and thickly populated coastal region, has gained its very own importance. Despite all of these, Indian coasts are under threat due to multiple stresses like global climate change and human intervention. These stresses are driving vulnerabilities like sea level rise, coastal erosion, frequent extreme events, and saltwater encroachment. In this critical scenario, coastal management has become one of the very important issues in the last two decades. Thus, coastal vulnerability assessment methods have been developed to identify and manage vulnerable areas over the coast. In the research paper, a major focus has been on different vulnerabilities to the coast of India and one of the assessment methods, the coastal vulnerability index methodology, applied over India. Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying the problem, quantifying it, and assessing the risk rate in formulating development strategies to reduce the risk and vulnerabilities. Proper planning and protection strategies for the Indian coast must be taken swiftly by the coastal management and policymakers to safeguard the coastal ecosystem and livelihoods. In recent years, much focus has been on coastal vulnerability assessments using various kinds of data. Most of the reported studies over the Indian coast are based on remote sensing and GIS methods.