Roughly a third of India's shoreline is eroding, and people live behind most of it.
The National Centre for Coastal Research has mapped the entire mainland and island coastline into eroding, stable and accreting stretches, over more than three decades. It is one of the most methodologically careful long-run environmental datasets India produces.
Its value increases when it is read against what sits behind the shoreline: settlements, fishing harbours, roads and mangrove cover. Erosion of an empty beach and erosion of a village are the same kilometre in the data and very different problems.
These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.
| Indicator | Unit | Source and year |
|---|---|---|
| Coastline eroding | km and % of coast | NCCR shoreline change atlasData year: 1990-2022 assessment |
| Coastline accreting or stable | km | NCCR shoreline change atlasData year: 1990-2022 assessment |
| Mangrove cover | sq km | Forest Survey of IndiaData year: India State of Forest Report 2023 |
| Marine protected area | % of territorial waters | MoEFCCData year: 2025 |
A coastal map of erosion class with settlement and mangrove overlays.
The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.
Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.
Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.
DataSpeaks · dataspeaks.global · Goal 14