A Kilometre Around 2.74 Hectares

In June 2022 the Supreme Court of India, on a bench led by Justice L. Nageswara Rao, directed that every wildlife sanctuary and national park in the country must have an eco-sensitive zone extending at least one kilometre from its boundary.

It is a sound principle. Protected areas leak at the edges; a reserve with quarrying and construction pressed against its boundary is not really protected. For a forest sanctuary, a kilometre of buffer is a kilometre of trees, villages and fields, and the rule does what it was written to do.

Now draw that circle around Mangalavanam.

The arithmetic goes strange

Mangalavanam is 2.74 hectares. It is a tidal lake fringed with mangrove, behind the Kerala High Court, in the middle of Ernakulam. It is smaller than three football pitches, and it is the smallest protected area the Kerala Forest Department manages.

A one-kilometre ring around it does not enclose a buffer of anything. It encloses central Kochi — office blocks, shopping streets, apartment towers, government buildings, a good stretch of the Marine Drive frontage, and, as Kerala’s counsel pointed out to the Supreme Court when the state sought relaxation, the Kerala High Court building itself.

The court that would hear the argument was standing inside the zone the argument was about.

Why urban sanctuaries break the framework

This is funnier than it is scandalous, but it points at something real. Indian conservation law is built around a mental picture: a large core of habitat, a periphery of gradually intensifying human use, and corridors linking one reserve to the next. Buffer zones, eco-sensitive zones and corridor protection all assume that shape.

Mangalavanam has no periphery. It has a wall of city at the boundary line on three sides and a canal to the backwaters on the fourth. It has no corridor to anywhere; the nearest comparable habitat is across water and traffic. It is all edge and no core — the exact configuration the framework has no vocabulary for.

And it is not unimportant despite that. What survives in those 2.74 hectares is a complete estuarine food web: mangrove roots trapping silt, crabs and fish in the shallows, and above them something over seventy recorded bird species, along with roughly thirty butterflies, four dragonflies, two damselflies, two amphibians, six mammals and four reptiles. A frequently cited single-day count in 2006 logged 194 birds across 32 species. That is not a remnant hanging on; that is a system working, at extraordinary density, in a footprint you could walk across in three minutes.

What is actually hurting it

Not the missing buffer. The buildings that are already there.

High-rise development along the boundary interferes with how the birds orient, take off and land — a colony this small depends on clear approach lines, and it has lost them on three sides. That damage was done before 2022 and no zone drawn on a map afterwards unbuilds a tower. Encroachment and dumping have been recurring problems too, and campaigners, researchers and the courts have each at different times pushed to hold the line where it still exists.

We cover that long argument separately in the towers on three sides. The point here is narrower: the legal instrument that arrived to protect this place was designed for a completely different kind of place, and the mismatch is not a technicality. It means the protections that would actually help — restrictions on building height and lighting on the immediate boundary, for instance — are not the ones the framework reaches for first.

How it survived at all

Not by protection, initially. By obscurity and ownership.

This whole shoreline was low, brackish, tidal mangrove before Kochi hardened it. Willingdon Island was dredged out of Vembanad between 1920 and 1936 to give the city a modern harbour, and the port works of that era rearranged the estuary wholesale. Mangalavanam is a remnant of what was there before — and it lasted because it sat in government hands, hemmed in behind official buildings, inconvenient to develop and largely forgotten while everything around it was filled and built.

It was notified as a bird sanctuary on 31 August 2004. Before that it had no legal protection at all. It survived for eighty years on the strength of nobody quite getting round to it.

Visiting

Treat it as a working reserve, not a park. Access is regulated by the Forest Department, generally from a watchtower or a short guided edge path, with hours and numbers deliberately kept small — because a site this size would be dominated by anyone walking through it. Check the current position with the Wildlife Warden’s office in Ernakulam before you go.

Go early, bring binoculars, and give it half an hour of standing still. The migratory season, roughly mid-January to early March, adds waders and warblers to the resident herons, egrets, cormorants and brahminy kites.