How not to save a coastline from erosion

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Editor's note: The city of Chennai is home to many monuments worth visiting. There’s the impressive Madras High Court building and the mysterious gateway-like structure on the Besant Nagar beach. But an even more interesting structure lies at the northern end of the city.  To the north of the Chennai Fort railway station and the Chennai Port, where the road runs along the Bay of Bengal, several rock walls protrude from the coast and into the sea. Crashing against the brown-bronze rock, the waves turn into foam. The walls are spaced a hundred or so meters apart, looking like a giant bar chart on the coastline. This is neither a tourist attraction nor a geological wonder. And when environmental journalists like me show up at such places, it’s usually bad news.  The rock walls, known as groynes (also spelt groins), are built by the government. They serve as a monument to our failure in solving environmental problems, and a warning as India prepares to adapt to the effects of climate change. These groynes were built in the mid-2000s as a “final solution” …