When most people think of salt in India, the white desert of the Rann of Kutch immediately comes to mind. Its endless sparkling stretches have become an icon, attracting travelers, photographers, and even filmmakers But apart from the glamour of Gujarat’s salt pans, there are also more humble, less showy lands on India’s coast where salt has been made for centuries. They are Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Odisha’s salt-producing communities, and their stories never make the headlines.
Whole families in the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu rise early to tend to the salt pans. The weather is arduous, the blistering sun beating down on the shallow pools of water, which reflect back a brightness piercing to the eyes. Workers use wooden rakes to scoop up the crystals, their feet hardened by years of standing in salt water.
For them, it is more than an activity but a tradition inherited from grandparents who once showed them the beat of salt. Different from factory salt production, which employs machinery and huge-scale evaporation methods, these communities depend on patience, weather, and pure physical labor.
Andhra Pradesh, with its protracted eastern seacoast, bears similar vignettes. People here usually tell of how the sea is a giver and a taker. In good monsoons, the salt pans thrive and families are able to make enough to send their kids to school or even fix their houses. But when the cyclones strike, as they frequently do, the weak earthen perimeters surrounding the pans are destroyed, leaving behind debt and smashed livelihoods. Salt, here, is not a commodity—it’s a risk taken on with nature.
In Odisha, most specifically in and around Chilika and the neighboring coastal districts, traditional salt pans whisper an even softer tale. These are societies that exist in the shadow of contemporary industries, where younger generations prefer to search for employment in cities instead of embracing the backbreaking endeavor of salt harvesting. But the older workers are still there, still bonded to the land and the brine. They talk of salt as holy, something that relates them to their forefathers who previously traded it in markets many years ago before packaged brands even came into existence.
What is wonderful about these salt pans is not so much the product they yield but the cultural footprint they leave. Each grain carries the sweat of those who wade ankle-deep in water for hours, shaping nature’s here and now into something that adorns our dinner plates. It is easy to forget, in a supermarket age of well-packaged bundles, that the salt we spinkle so freely on our food could have been thought up by the hand of a farmer who has never heard praise.
These neglected salt pans lack neither the splendor of Kutch nor the hype of tourist publications but are indeed living museums of resilience. They ought to attract attention not just as economic locations but as monuments to tradition, human resolve, and India’s unheralded past. Remembering them turns out to be a tribute to the people who still make value from the earth, even when the world scarcely takes note.