Archiving Coastal Lives

Both Kalavathy and Lakshmanan represent voices of discontent and suffering against the disaster management programs which has pushed them to survive in vulnerable settings. Our first story maps the impact of Post Tsunami rehabilitation projects and thermal power plants on the fishing communities who lived in coastal villages along the Cuddalore Coast. By recording the myriad ways ordinary men and women responded to the crisis and the multiple and often contestatory frameworks employed by them to understand the impact of state led rehabilitation projects, the disaster memories project is an attempt to write against bureaucratic and reductive definitions of calamitous events and recover voices that have otherwise been silenced by state and institutional discourses. We focus on how and what people remember of the disaster and their perception of the social and physical infrastructures put in place to build back and resettle the populations. In looking at the contradictory impact of the different infrastructural and rehabilitation projects on the coastal economies, we focus on RUINS and the transformation of these spaces into zones of large scale land acquisition, toxic wastes, abandoned projects and debris which have pushed coastal communities into a spiralling cycle of indebtedness and marginalisation.