21 families battle relentless high-tide flooding on Kochi’s tiny Lanka island; new community-driven project offers hope

Kochi: For 63-year-old Valli, high tides mean more than salt water entering her home. It means being unable to use the toilet, struggling to walk on cracked, peeling feet, and, when water floods the house at night, climbing onto a raised cot to sleep. Her old house on Lanka, a tiny island in Ezhikkara grama panchayat of North Paravur in Ernakulam, collapsed after years of waterlogging. She now lives with her son in a makeshift structure beside the ruins, which offers little protection when the water rises.

Medication heals the skin on her hands and feet, only for it to split open again when the brackish water returns. Yet, Valli continues to leave home for domestic work despite the pain. “When the water rises, we cannot go to the toilet at all. We have to wait until it recedes. If I don’t go to work, how will we survive? There is no other way,” she told Onmanorama.

For Valli and around 100 other residents of Lanka, a community-led initiative to be inaugurated by Chief Minister V D Satheesan on November 15 could finally offer hope of relief from a crisis that has increasingly taken over their lives. Called Resilient Lanka, the project seeks lasting solutions to high-tide flooding that inundates homes, roads and agricultural land.

The island, home to 21 families, is surrounded by a river on one side and Pokkali paddy and shrimp farms on the other three. Its unusual name has its own stories. According to local resident Gireesh Gopalan, one version is that people once had to cross the river to reach the mainland, prompting others to tease them with the words, ‘take the ferry to Lanka’. Another local account traces the name to an earlier landlord who supposedly came from Ceylon.

“Earlier, there was a pattern to tidal flooding, and it was largely seasonal. But now it has become almost a daily phenomenon, and on some days it happens more than once. The time taken for the water to recede has also increased,” says Gireesh, 48, a fisherman and convener of the Lanka Janakeeya Samithi, formed by the island’s families.

During high tides, water rises one to two feet above normal road level and sometimes remains for days around the new moon. When the tide surges around midnight, residents can find themselves dealing with waterlogging for nearly five days as the tidal cycle shifts.

Septic tanks fill up, toilets become unusable, and kitchens get inundated. Some residents place bricks or stones inside their kitchens to stand on while cooking. “When the water rises, the septic tanks fill up, and nothing flushes down,” Gireesh says.

The hardship falls particularly heavily on women. While men somehow wade through the water to fish or find work, women are left to manage households, bathe children, and prepare them for school.

Yet, the islanders are reluctant to leave. Their lives and livelihoods are closely tied to the surrounding land and water. Pokkali cultivation occupies seven months of the year, followed by five months of shrimp farming. Fishing and clam collection provide additional income.

“If we sell this place and move somewhere else, we will have to come all the way back here for work. We also need space to keep our boats and dry our nets. Other than the flooding, this is a wonderful place to live,” Gireesh says.

It is against this backdrop that Resilient Lanka is taking shape, with residents themselves at the centre of the proposed solutions. Kochi-based climate-tech and research enterprise Equinoct is implementing the initiative with financial support from the Happiness Project, a philanthropic foundation established by Xylem founder Ananthu S, and under the supervision of Ezhikkara panchayat.

The project builds on five years of work by Equinoct with coastal communities to document tidal flooding. The organisation distributed high-tide flooding calendars to around 10,000 households along the Kochi coast. Residents recorded the occurrence and extent of flooding every day during 2023-24. The data helped develop a dashboard mapping houses and roads affected by rising backwater levels and contributed to the State Government declaring high-tide flooding a state-specific disaster on January 30, 2026.

Residents have now formed the Lanka Janakeeya Samithi to participate in identifying problems, designing interventions and monitoring their implementation.

“Our goal is not to bring a ready-made solution from outside and test it here. The problem itself and the solution should emerge from the community,” says Equinoct CEO C G Madhusoodhanan.

Research director Sreeja K G says individual efforts such as raising the ground around houses can worsen flooding for neighbours by obstructing drainage. “If one person raises his plot with soil, he doesn’t think about how it affects his neighbour’s drainage. Everyone is trying to protect their own house, but this cannot be solved through individual efforts,” she says.

The proposed interventions include strengthening existing bunds, identifying weak points, improving drainage and exploring measures to protect vulnerable houses. Scientific projections of sea-level rise up to 2050 will be combined with residents’ knowledge of local flooding patterns to prepare a Detailed Project Report by the end of 2026.

The initiative has received an initial funding of around ₹22 lakh for the feasibility-study phase, with support of up to ₹2 cr possible if the pilot progresses.

For the 21 families who have spent years adjusting their lives to the rhythm of rising and receding tides, the initiative represents a chance to find a collective solution without abandoning the island they call home.