Spread across eastern India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans is one of the world’s largest remaining mangrove deltas. It hosts exceptional biodiversity, including globally endangered species, among which the most well-known is the Royal Bengal tiger. The area is so unique that UNESCO has demarcated part of the Sundarbans as a World Heritage site, or a place of “outstanding value to humanity.”
Dense forests, sprawling paddy fields, and numerous ponds and tidal rivers are part of the Sundarbans geography. Partly urban, with large swathes of rural areas, many locations are extremely remote and accessible only by local ferries. Embankments made of mud and other materials are conspicuous features of the landscape, especially in areas where villages are close to rivers.
About 40 percent of the Sundarbans is in India’s West Bengal state. Some 4.4 million people live there — or at least they try to. For those who call the network of islands and mangrove forests home, life has never been easy. They constantly grapple with debilitating conditions that include widespread unemployment, hostile conditions for agriculture, conflict with wildlife, and destructive cyclones.
Lately, living in the Sundarbans has become even more difficult. In the last three years, a series of nearly back-to-back cyclones — Fani (April 2019), Amphan (May 2020), Bulbul (November 2020), and Yaas (May 2021) — has hammered the region.
According to government data, Cyclone Bulbul alone affected 3.5 million people in West Bengal, including in wide swathes of Sundarbans spread over South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas districts. More than 500,000 houses were destroyed and over 1.4 million hectares of agricultural land were damaged.
The Sundarbans itself has acted as a shield against storms, cyclones, and tidal surges. But climate change and deforestation have greatly diminished its role as such.
“I have heard Sundarbans will drown soon because of global warming,” says Kajal Lata Biswas, a resident of Gobindakati village in North 24 Parganas District, over 100 km north of Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal. “But can we even do anything about it in our villages? The cycle of destruction, coping with losses, and rebuilding is endless.”
From lost livelihoods to illnesses
According to Biswas, her family is still reeling from the ravages of Cyclone Bulbul, which had badly hurt their finances. She says, “Our land used to be full of trees. But now it’s all empty.”
Her family’s land is about 1.33 hectares. Bulbul destroyed their trees that were worth about INR 130,000 (US$1,745). Some of the trees had taken over 30 years to grow.
Prior to Bulbul, Biswas and her husband had been planning to sell mahogany, sonajhuri, eucalyptus, and shirish trees for INR 60,000 (US$804.58). “We were negotiating with a wood trader and had nearly finalized the sale,” says Biswas. “But Bulbul hit almost the very next day, and uprooted the trees.”
The family also lost its rice crop, usually harvested from November to December, to insects. In addition, an acute water scarcity during the summer of 2021 prevented Biswas from sowing rice — the only crop that grows on their land, and in large parts of Sundarbans.
“Rice is the only source of income for most,” Biswas says. “But water scarcity at the time of sowing and unexpected cyclones at the time of harvesting means that even this precious single source of income cannot be relied on.”
“This isn’t just our story,” she says. “It is the story of the whole of Sundarbans. Untimely rain and cyclones are spelling misery, exhaustion, and financial losses that we just cannot overcome.”
Indications are there will be more of the same ahead — perhaps even worse. According to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the Indian Ocean, where the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea are located, has warmed faster than the global average. Further warming will lead to severe and frequent coastal flooding. Sea levels will continue to rise, with more cyclones also likely to occur.
But climate change in the Sundarbans is not just destroying crops, trees, and homes. It’s also affecting people’s lives in many other adverse ways, such as hurting children’s access to regular schooling and education.
According to a 2020 People’s Archive of Rural India article, cyclones are forcing children to drop out of school. Cyclones cause increased salinity of water, adversely affecting farming and fishing. Families thus migrate from their villages in search of work, thereby disrupting the children’s schooling. Shrinking family incomes also lead to children being forced to find paid work instead of going to school. These days, the pandemic-induced lockdown has further worsened the education prospects of children, especially those of girls, some of who are being forced to marry early.
The inundation of ponds and tube wells with saline water, post cyclones, has caused a serious crisis of drinking water as well. Excessive water salinity is also the cause of cardiovascular diseases, dysentery, typhoid, and skin diseases in the Sundarbans. For women, there are increased miscarriage risks and a range of other gynecological problems.
In search of solutions
In a 2017 complaint to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), lawyer and activist Radhankanta Tripathy said that people in the Sundarbans have been denied the right to be rehabilitated and resettled. Tripathy also drew attention to human rights violations in the Sundarbans regarding livelihood and nutrition, healthcare, potable water, sanitation, and hygiene.
The NHRC responded by sending a special rapporteur to the affected areas to assess the situation. The resulting report of that visit included a series of recommendations with regard to improving health facilities, livelihoods, drinking water, and education; compensation for tiger attack victims and their families; and preventing human trafficking. By March 2021, various departments of the West Bengal government had received copies of the report and were expected to take action. Yet while the government still needs to submit a report of actions taken, the NHRC now considers the case closed.
After the Yaas cyclone of May 2021, villagers marched in protest and demanded embankments made of concrete, instead of the distribution of relief material. The demand for concrete embankments is a longstanding one and has repeatedly come from the people, whose lives are periodically derailed by cyclones.
There are 3,500 km of mud embankments across the Sundarbans, of which nearly 800 km were severely damaged by Cyclone Aila in 2009. The central government had formed a task force for restoring the embankments for which INR 5,000 crore (approx. US$6.68 million) was allocated. But up till now only 84 km of embankments have been constructed, with much of the funds remaining unused. Some of the more recently constructed embankments withstood the fresh wave of cyclones; many did not.
Some residents have been considering leaving the Sundarbans, especially after the latest cyclone, Yaas. Jadavpur University student Pintu Das, who is working on his Ph.D. dissertation on disaster capitalism in the Sundarbans, observes, “People are beginning to feel that it is no longer tenable to live in the Sundarbans. Those who have some money are buying land or houses near Kolkata. But not everyone can do that.”
The areas where people can resettle are also becoming scarce. The West Bengal government has already resettled hundreds of families from islands like Ghoramara, where large chunks of land have been swallowed by steady river erosion, to the nearby Sagar island. But even Sagar island is slowly being eroded.
“Merely moving out people cannot be the solution,” says Das, a resident of Krishnadaspur in South 24 Parganas, and who grew up seeing the destruction caused by cyclones and climate change. He says that the government should consider extensively building robust embankments that can withstand decades of erosion, planting trees across the Sundarbans, preserving mangroves, and constructing houses of strong material, instead of mud and thatch.
“The government needs to consult locals instead of giving importance to only bureaucrats,” says Das, who still remembers how Cyclone Aila nearly brought his family into financial ruin more than a decade ago. “Local people’s ideas must be heard. Since they live there, they are much more attuned to rain and weather patterns, and aware of the areas which are most vulnerable to flooding and strong winds.”
“Even Sagar Island is being eroded and Kolkata is also at risk,” Das points out. “There are lakhs (tens of thousands) of families in the Sundarbans. How and where will they be given a place to live? Does the government just plan to move people to urban slums and wastelands?”
So far, the people have been offered no solutions. Meanwhile, for the likes of Kajal Lata Biswas, fear and weariness combine in anticipation of the next cyclone. ●
Urvashi Sarkar is an independent journalist based in Mumbai. She was a fellow with the People’s Archive of Rural India for which she reported from Sundarbans, West Bengal.