This is the fourth article in the ‘The Coastal Course’ series, co-curated by Centre for Financial Accountability and Delhi Forum, reflecting on 10 years of Sagarmala initiative. The first, second and third articles are here, here and here.The recent amendment to the Forest Conservation Act (under the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam) to allow private entities to undertake plantation activities in forest areas has raised concerns among forest dwellers and environmentalists. This is because a plantation is not a forest, nor does it protect forest areas and their complex ecologies. Rather plantations are dominated by a single species, for felling, as opposed to natural forests, which create and thrive upon a diversity of human and non-human lives.The commercial plantation began with colonial policies that treated forest resources as commodities and demarcated forest areas for timber production and extraction (initially for railway construction, then for coal, and later for environmental conservation). The idea that forests and plantations need to be protected from communities dependent on forest resources also echoes a casteist environmental discourse that seeks to preserve nature as pure. Reserved forests and plantations promote the removal or restriction of Dalit, Adivasi and nomadic people from them, while paradoxically opening nature for sale as a commodity.As part of the Union government’s Blue Economy approach and the Maritime Vision 2030, mangrove plantations similarly promote market-driven conservation initiatives that change the way in which intertidal geographies as coastal commons, are inhabited. The Blue Economy refers to an approach that assumes that oceans and coastal resources can be used for commercial purpose, while also ensuring environmental sustainability.Mangrove grounds at riskIn India, the definition of what constitutes a forest is complex; forests encompass diverse ecosystems and biogeographic zones, including deserts, wetlands, and coastal areas. Mangroves, for example, flourish in coastal areas where freshwater mixes with saltwater and are included in the category of forest. Marine and coastal ecosystems include 4,662 km2 of diverse mangroves species across the country (Forest Survey of India 2011). In this context, the new policy is relevant for coastal wetlands and mudflats.Mangroves were under the forest department in 1972-73 but remained marginal until the 1991 cyclone impacted large parts of coastal Kutch and destroyed dense mangrove ecosystems. This initiated state, national and international support for the protection of mangroves. The tsunami of 2004 further illustrated the urgent need for coastal disaster preparedness, including replanting degraded and deforested mangrove areas to strengthen coastal protection.In India, Gujarat has the second-largest mangrove cover, after the Sunderbans in West Bengal, concentrated primarily across the Gulf of Kutch, from Jamnagar to Bachau, Mundra and Jakhau to Lakhpat, and the Kori Creek region near the International Maritime Boundary Line. While a limited variety of mangroves were historically found in the Gulf, today the Avicennia Marina dominates because of its unique adaptation to high salinity and tidal amplitude, and its capacity to release excess salt through their root systems. As various reports by the Gujarat Ecological Society (GEC) have shown, these coastal grounds have increasingly come under threat by industrialisation, developmental activities and pollution.Mangrove seeds in the Gulf of Kutch. Photo: Ishita S.These intertidal areas are muddy grounds and creek systems that are submerged during high tide, including island systems near the coast. They are often misunderstood as uninhabited empty spaces, but are lively spaces that sustain the lives of fishing and pastoral communities, spiritually and economically, as do other forest regions inhabited by Adivasi, Dalit, and other nomadic groups. Multiple language names for mangroves in Kutch and Saurashtra include cher, cheriyana jhad, tuvar, and bakal jo jhad in Gujarati, Hindi, Sindhi and Kutchi, respectively.While historical descriptions of the mangrove emphasise their importance in people’s everyday lives, today these are primarily restricted to mangrove leaves as fodder and for fishing. The Vagher fishers and Fakirani Jat have a generational heritage of working in these regions and intimate knowledge of different saline plants, including mangroves. Talking to the fisher, the pastoral communities, mangroves, I’ve learnt that mangroves grow together with other saline plants like the lana and hold a diversity of birds, marine reptiles, crabs, bacteria, viruses – a coastal ecosystem. Wetlands, desert and forests, mangroves are a saline, interconnected nutrient-dense, watery geography sustained by a mix of seawater, freshwater and rainwater. Conservation through plantationsMangroves, known for their capacity to build land, protect against storm surges and sequester carbon, have become a key ‘object’ in the climate change conversation. They bring together financial markets, climate targets, and state-led developmental initiatives. Like logistics and infrastructure projects taking place under the ambit of the Sagarmala, mangroves are perceived as an ‘infrastructure’ of the coast, for example, as bio-shields in the language of conservation and the forest department.Overall, Kutch has approximately 5661.08 square km of forest area, including reserved, protected, and unclassed forests (Gujarat Forest Statistics, 2024-2025). While figures differ across various sources, according to the website of the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests in Gujarat, 2332 km square has been identified as potential areas for mangrove development in Kachchh and the Gulf of Kutch (which would include Jamnagar and the southern shore of the Gulf), while between 2014 and 2023, 249 km square were developed as mangrove plantations. Another document on mangroves from the Forest Department notes that 543 km square of mudflats have been identified as potential areas for mangrove plantations.Protection and destructionCharacterising land as wasteland, “unused” or “empty” opens these submerged grounds to plantation activities. The financing and making of plantations draws together diverse actors and financing sources, such as developmental aid, government funds, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds, and international climate financing.Across the Gulf of Kutch, for example, the TATA Chemicals, the Adani Group, The Gujarat Maritime Board, public sector companies from Gujarat as well as international organisations such as the Agha Khan Foundation in collaboration with Gujarat-based groups such as the Gujarat Ecological Society (GES) and the Gujarat Institute of Desert Ecology (GUIDE) have all carried out mangrove plantations. Some of them, particularly led by organisations such as the GES, have successfully include communities in the plantation process. At the same time, as P.K. Vishwanathan from the Gujarat Institute of Development Research suggests in an article, the involvement of private players in mangrove conservation yields private gains in the form of carbon credits and increased access to global markets, as it demonstrates compliance with green activities. Currently, private plantations and forest departments in Kutch regulate and restrict access to private plantation areas, raising questions about who has ownership and jurisdiction over the utilisation of these coastal areas. In other words, who gets to exercise authority and enforce singular use in these coastal areas, which have traditionally had multiple uses?Moreover, while official figures suggest that plantations have led to a significant increase in mangroves, fieldwork indicated that the growth of moderate and light mangroves has been accompanied by the cutting of older, dense mangroves with high ecological value, for example, around the Gulf of Kutch. Srivastava and Mehta (2023) show how plantations in Kutch allow for protection in one place and corporate takeover of coastal zones in another.Plantations flourish as substitutes for older mangroves, even though studies suggest that mangrove plantations cannot replace dense forest mangroves or replicate the ecological value of original mangrove systems (Gopal 2014). Ecological value refers to the complexity of ecological systems, the diversity of life forms they support, and their intrinsic worth.Intertidal areas are watery grazing and fishing groundsDemarcating plantations in watery grounds makes the mobility of fisher and pastoral communities illegal and subject to regulation. Communities are subject to growing restrictions by industrial actors and the forest department, as grazing is seen as a threat to mangrove plantations, even though there is no clear evidence to support this claim. Plantation language frames traditional communities who occupy these regions, as ‘fringe poor’ or ‘marginal communities’ whose dependence on coastal resources need to be replaced by other skills such as horticulture, eco-tourism, apiary (bee cultivation) etc. While community participation is meant to take along the community, in many cases, it translates to fishers and pastoralists acting as underpaid workers carrying out plantation activities, while grazing and fishing required permissions or depended on personal relations or the goodwill of the forest department or industry actors.To conclude, companies and business groups across Asia and Africa have increasingly expanded into activities beyond traditional markets and into the ambit of protecting nature. This expansion includes conservation and plantation activities that identify specific elements of nature as commodities that have some value now and will have future value, such as linkages to carbon markets. While keeping local communities involved in the name of participation, they restructure the rules of access and regulation in areas that had previously been commons, inviting new forms of privatised control.In the logic of plantations, mangroves are identified as individual trees, rather than as members of a larger social and ecological community composed of humans and non-humans that deserve protection. Conceptualising the mangrove as an individual tree allows for it to be cut in one place and replaced by a sapling planted at another location. Such initiatives normalise the practice of replacing older mangroves systems with new plantations—assuming that climate targets can be met by measuring mitigation through counting the number of trees planted and the carbon buried under them. While mangrove grounds are under threat of transforming into privatised or state-controlled land, communities with a history of inhabiting these areas are slowly turning into labour, beneficiaries of plantation activities and encroachers in their own watery grounds.Ishita Sharma is a researcher and PhD candidate at TU Delft in The Netherlands.