Kerala High Court sets aside the order forming the Vizhinjam coastal erosion panel and asks for an independent one

30 October 2026

The Kerala High Court has set aside the government order of 6 October 2022 that formed an expert committee to study coastal erosion near the Vizhinjam International Seaport. Justice Harisankar V Menon held the committee was wrongly constituted: its chairman, M D Kudale, had retired from a senior post at the Pune research station that advises on coastal engineering, and had earlier sat on a technical sub-committee connected with developing this very port. A member in that position, the Court said, should have been kept out, because a conflict of this kind goes to whether the body was independent at all. The State has been told to put together a fresh committee of independent experts, taking the Court's observations and the stakeholders' views into account. The earlier committee's report, which had found no erosion attributable to the port, cannot be acted upon. Residents of fishing villages lying within twenty kilometres north of Vizhinjam were the petitioners. The Court did not examine the science of the report, and the petition had not asked for port construction to stop.