No One Wants To Be the Fall Guy for Oil Spills off India’s Coast
- Pragathi Ravi and Flavia Lopes
- 9 minutes ago
- 8 min read
When Santosh Monikar walks along the damp golden sand covering the shores of Harihareshwar Beach, he finds his path obstructed by black streaks of tar that cling to the sand.
These globules of oil, better known as tarballs, are deceptively complex. Seemingly solid at first, they turn into a greasy black residue upon touch. Clumps of this tar cover this entire beach in Raigad, a town about 120 kilometres (75 miles) away from Mumbai. They release a pungent, acrid smell — an unmistakable sign of petroleum. Their persistence is a stark reminder of the pollution that lurks offshore and leaves its remnants on the beach, where turtles would frequently come to lay their eggs, but not anymore, Monikar says, worried.
In February 2024, the National Green Tribunal of India heard a case filed by the Brackish Water Research Center three years ago against the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, a case that highlighted the persistent issue of tarballs along the coastlines of Goa, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.
This was not the first time such a case was presented. For years, offshore oil rigs and drilling operations from the Bombay High Oil Fields have been the source of several oil spills. In 2024, six large oil spills greater than 700 tonnes occurred, involving tanker incidents and fuel oil.
While it is difficult to gather precise data on petrochemical deposits across India’s western coast, activists and residents have noticed an escalating presence of tarballs defiling the shores and sinking deeper into the land that many rely on for survival.
Fisherfolk who depend on smaller species like the Indian white mullet (locally known as boi) are hit the hardest. This fish, highly sensitive to oil contamination, is often among the first to perish after a spill. Even when caught alive, contaminated boi frequently reeks of oil and chemicals, posing serious health risks and making it unsellable, says Kiran Koli, general secretary of the Akhil Maharashtra Macchimar Kriti Samiti.
“For small-scale fishers, who already operate on thin margins, such losses are crippling,” he says. “Unlike large operators, we don’t have the means to recover from this kind of damage.”
In Nagaon, a coastal village in Raigad and home to India’s second-largest container port, a 2023 spill from a plant operated by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, India’s largest crude oil and natural gas company, spread into the sea, contaminating farmlands, mangroves, and marine life. The oil has sunk so deep that groundwater pumped from borewells still smells stale, says Vaibhav Yashwanta Kadu, president of the Nagaon Youth Association.
“When tarballs reside in the sands — especially in low-lying coastal areas where seawater intrudes into agricultural land — they degrade soil quality,” says BN Kumar, activist at the NatConnect Foundation in Mumbai.
Yet, the state governments in charge have been quick to normalise this, by writing off this phenomenon as a byproduct of the monsoon season, simply an annual occurrence.
Unlike oil spills caused by shipping vessels, these offshore oil spills don’t benefit from international compensation frameworks. Instead, they rely on national mechanisms, which, according to activists, are poorly enforced. This fuels a regulatory black hole where communities bear the brunt of environmental damage as agencies shirk off the blame.
No recognition or remedies for the devastated
For 20 years, conservationist and director of Mumbai’s Coastal Conservation Foundation Shaunak Modi has seen the beaches of western India suffer through a tarball invasion. His meticulous documentation shows that tarballs are appearing on beaches at a greater frequency, alluding to a greater problem than a seasonal recurrence.
“This isn’t confined to monsoons; it’s a symptom of something far worse happening offshore,” Modi says. “By calling it an ‘annual event,’ authorities are absolving themselves of responsibility. This is not nature’s doing — it’s a crisis caused by human activity.”
Some of India’s largest oil fields lie on its western coast. They are operated by several major players such as Cairn India and Jindal Drilling, with the largest rigs among those operated by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. The Corporation is responsible for 70% of the national crude oil and natural gas output, with oil fields like Bombay High, Neelam, and Heera as its major sources.
A 2019 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India revealed significant shortcomings in how the state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation reports spillage incidents. Between 2012-2013 and 2016-2017, the Corporation only reported 13% of incidents that took place within its mandatory 500-meter safety zone.
Beach clean-up operations take place all year-round in Mumbai, but between April and September, crews tackle these tarballs and their oil residue daily, making their task an uphill battle. In Mumbai, this task is outsourced to private contractors hired by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the governing civic body of the city. But no matter who is tasked with the cleanup, they all seem bewildered by this problem that just never seems to go away.
“Every monsoon, we brace ourselves for another wave of tarballs,” Kumar says. “Authorities come in with clean-up crews once the tarballs hit the beaches, but by then, the damage is already done. What we need is proactive monitoring and stricter enforcement of environmental regulations to prevent spills in the first place.”
From Gujarat to Goa, communities and environmentalists have long complained about these clean-up efforts that only offer temporary relief to a long-lasting problem. For these communities, the institutional apathy they face is just as pervasive as the oil that refuses to leave their lands.
Environmentalist Mohan Upadhyay noticed tarballs accumulating along the shoreline on Harihareshwar Beach in 2021, right after a vessel collapsed in the Arabian Sea. The spill spread from Raigad to Sindhudurg, disrupting both fishing and tourism in the region.
Farmer Surekha Gharat in Nagaon saw her family’s rice harvest decimated in the aftermath of the 2023 spill. She tried planting after the spill, but says the crops did not grow, and the family lost out on an entire season’s harvest. “The oil remained in the soil,” she says. Only a fraction of their 2.5-acre land remains cultivable now.
Gharat says she noticed the first signs of trouble when her husband noticed an oily sheen coating the farmland next to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation’s discharge unit. The rest of the villagers soon realized the contamination wasn’t limited to their field — the nearby mangroves and the shoreline were also affected.
After the fishing grounds were contaminated and the fish stocks diminished, many were forced to venture farther into the sea. This was not something all could afford. The wealthier fishers, with larger boats and trawlers, could survive, but the small-scale, traditional fishers who relied on coastal waters found it hard to stay afloat.
Marine researcher Bhushan Bhoir points to a different source of pollution in the nearby region of Palghar: large fishing vessels operating in the open sea that discharge oil and fuel residues into the waters. This is particularly problematic during the monsoon season when strong tides push the spilled oil closer to the shore.
In Nagaon, when villagers noticed the sudden signs of contamination, they approached the authorities.
“It took weeks just to convince that a spill had happened,” Kadu says. Despite photographic evidence of oil-covered fields and polluted water, bureaucratic inertia stalled any real action. By the time the officials acknowledged the spill, the damage was done — crops and fish were ruined, putting livelihoods on the brink.
For the next three months, the villagers fought for compensation. Meetings were held, protests organized, and petitions submitted, but progress remained painfully slow. When compensation finally came through, it was a fraction of what the affected communities needed to recover.
The tribunal hearing in 2024 was one of the first to hold the oil spills responsible for the devastation of shorelines through tarballs, but also admitted that there were no feasible ways to prevent these oil globules from reaching the shores.
No one claims responsibility
According to the National Oil Spill Disaster Contingency Plan, the Indian Coast Guard has to lead any clean-up operations when an oil spill occurs in coastal waters up to 12 nautical miles from the shore. But once the spill reaches land, the burden to clean up shifts to state governments and pollution control boards, who are tasked with monitoring this environmental contamination.
However, the particular responsibilities for cleanup are not delineated to specific bodies in the Contingency Plan. On the ground, this means that there is a messy overlap of jurisdiction, further complicated by sluggish coordination among the concerned parties.
Sometimes, the issues start right with identifying the source of the spill. When oil spills occur due to a vessel, the Indian Directorate General of Shipping steps in to investigate, and the responsible shipping companies face penalties under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1958.
Nearby ports have to be informed about the spill, and any compensation claims can be made under the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund, provided the vessel belongs to a country that has signed the Fund agreement.
However, when spills originate from sources such as offshore oil rigs, drilling sites, or refineries, the cleanup process becomes murky. Ideally, if the spill can be traced back to a particular field or refinery, the oil company responsible for the spill is also responsible for the containment and cleanup process, Kumar says. Offshore operations are required to maintain spill response plans under the Offshore Safety Directive, which means they should be able to handle any minor spills on their own without the involvement of the Indian Coast Guard.
But corporations often fail to accept responsibility for spills, and it can be hard to trace the spills back to their original source. When Sarita Fernandes was a researcher at the Marinelife of Mumbai in 2019, she filed an information request with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation seeking the source of the tarballs that had washed ashore.
“Unlike regular tennis ball-sized tarballs that we used to see each year, that year it was the size of a basketball,” Fernandes says. The tarballs may seem like a minor season issue, and “it is easy to clean up tarballs compared to large-scale oil spills, but the cumulative environmental impact is significant,” she says.
A 2014 study by the Indian National Institute of Oceanography did a chemical fingerprint analysis of tarballs on the Gujarat coast during the 2012 monsoon and traced them back to the Bombay High oil fields, which are operated by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation.
Yet, when BMC submitted a response to Fernandes’s request, it said that, unlike for specific oil spill incidents, the source of these particular tarballs was difficult to identify. “Speaking to a lot of fishers and researchers, we found that the possible source could be the offshore oil rigs that often undertake maintenance work and washing every monsoon,” she says.
The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation did not respond to The Xylom’s request for comment.
The National Green Tribunal has set the “polluter pays” principle through landmark cases such as Samir Mehta vs. Union of India (2011) where shipping companies and vessel owners were held accountable for environmental damage. The Tribunal ruled that the companies were negligent and slapped penalties for cleanups, restoration efforts, as well as compensation for the affected communities.
But there have been no such efforts made for the chronic spillage from offshore rigs and drilling operations, which can cause prolonged and extensive damage to marine ecosystems and coastal residents over time. The lack of accountability shown by the complex web of involved stakeholders, including rig operators, contractors, and coastal regulators, makes it worse.
“These rigs are positioned just outside the 12-nautical-mile boundary, making them difficult for state governments to monitor,” Fernandes says.
This makes the Coast Guard responsible for handling this issue, but they don’t take this crisis as seriously as they should, Modi says. “The [Oil and Natural Gas Corporation] would rather pay fines year after year than address the root cause of the problem, which could be a leak from offshore drilling.”
None of these one-off compensations accounts for the slow devastation that people have witnessed for decades now. Despite the awareness that activists like Kumar have been trying to build, nothing has changed.
Even today, much of the farmland that was destroyed by oil spills, like Gharat’s, remains unproductive. Affected communities are trapped in an ever-worsening cycle of ecological decline, a haunting reminder of the long-term impact of oil spills as well as the slow pace of institutional response.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
