Chitta Majhi, a history student of Balugaon College, on the banks of Chilka, has grown up with the lake. During winter, Chitta used to play with migratory birds right in front of his house. "Sometimes I could find the migratory birds right inside my bedroom', he remem-bers. For his father, a fisherfolk, the fish catch was so huge that the unsold fish had to be dumped.

All that is history now. Chilka is shrinking so fast that within a decade it has created space for this college, a market and a residen-tial colony. Chilka's slow death already spells doom for the 122 villages whose livelihood depend on the lake. Chilka is also on the