Ratnagiri made it to our list of cities partly because of a unique feature of its history highlighted by Amitav Ghosh in The Glass Palace and partly because of its proximity to Panchgani. The drive from Panchgani to Ratnagiri through the picturesque route of the Sahyadri mountains down the Mahad ghat sealed the deal of starting our nagarnagar travels with Ratnagiri.
Ratnagiri, a small sleepy Konkan town on Maharashtra’s coast, is considered the largest coastal city between Mumbai and Goa. Its beautiful landscape consists of breathtaking ocean waves crashing into jagged mountain cliffs at high tide with surreal rock formations exposed during low tide contrasted with the green estuaries just 500 meters away.
Each of these geographical features, the mountains, the estuaries as well as the coastline provide a unique economic history to Ratnagiri. The laterite rock plateaus along with the red iron rich soil provide the perfect soil for the world famous alphonso mangos. In our discussions with a local geologist, he explained that the unique taste of these mangoes comes as a result of the iron content in this soil. The plateaus also provide the perfect climes for cashews. Cashew orchards are interspersed amongst the mango farms.
The estuaries were navigable until 1985 providing the only means of travel to towns like Harchiri and Rajwada. The road networks have only developed over the last two decades. With the roads developed and the silting of the many of the estuaries, the waterways have become mostly defunct other than the odd fishing boat and a couple of small river crossings. But this network of waterways has historically meant that locals are well versed with ship-building. Historically, artisans from Ratnagiri were hired by the British for ship-building and are still hired around Belgaum and Kolhapur for their carpentry skills.
As these traditional occupations are on the wane, with mango and cashew being seasonal, there has been a spurt of a peculiar kind of service industry. Ratnagiri, a town of merely 70,000 persons, is home to at least fifty banks, many of which that have recently established branches. This business seems to be thriving partly to do with another aspect of Ratnagiri’s history and geographical location, its remittances. Through the 1900’s, Ratnagiri has acted as a key source of labour for Mumbai’s growing business and service industries. Given the similarity in language and geography, there has been a strong economic linkage between the two cities with every household from Ratnagiri has at least one person in Mumbai.
Even though Ratnagiri has a number of universities few of the skilled graduates stay in Ratnagiri. Mainly those with a family businesses continue to stay in Ratnagiri, many others are still migrating to Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore. However, we met a couple of young men that have made their way back from Mumbai to set up a tech startup in Ratnagiri. Their allure for Ratnagiri were the short (10 minutes to anywhere) commute times, clean air and generally living in Ratnagiri. They explained that the benefits of living in Ratnagiri were far more than the challenges of living in Ratnagiri especially when compared to life in a metro.
