Living in the Vanishing lands of Sundarbans: Women and Children face the Rage of the rising Rivers

Every morning thirteen year old Rabiya Khatoon living on the edge of the Muri Gonga (a distributary of the Hoogly river) in Ghoramara islands wake up to run to the banks and check the level of water. The high tides have been frequently washing away her mud and hay stacked hut more frequently than ever before. Rabiya goes to the local school but checks the timing of the tide before leaving for school. Of late the pucca building of the centrally located “Hathkhola Pratham Prathamik Bidyalaya, the only primary school in the island has served more like a shelter home than an education Center. People are used to running out of their homes to escape the high tides that washes their homes in the middle of the night and taking shelter in the first floor of the school building. “Rabiya lives in extreme fear. Each year the river gets closer and closer to my house. The water frequently washes away the huts. The mud embankment that we have built gets washed away too. And we again build our house a little far away in the fields”, says Rabiul Islam Saha, Rabiya’s father with tears in his eyes. A small time rice grower in the village has to shift his house by a few meters every year for fear of being washed away. His house couple of years back had stood on the banks where the palm trees and the mud embankment stood. Now a bamboo fence all across the island has been built by the villagers so that it can withstand the cyclonic winds somewhat and give them time to take shelter in the school.

The iota of fear rises each day! Rabiul’s house near Kheya Ghat at the Ghoramara islands is half bend by the flash wave of water that broke the embankment a few weeks ago. “We do not have any money. People who are migrating are the ones who could afford to buy land or have place to stay. Our relatives went away. I cannot because we have nowhere to go” shyly Rabia speaks up. At thirteen her school is closed most of the time of the year because either teachers cannot commute regularly to the village school or the school turns as temporary shelter for the climate immigrants. “There is just one ferry that goes to and fro during the day to Sagar islands. We go and buy our stuff from there. But during low tide or high tide these ferries cannot sail and we are left stranded here”, explains Mohan Maji a seventy year old woman who’s earns a living out of buffing the mud houses with cow dung. She is paid rupees five for a three hour job in somewhat better homes in the island.“The river was never like this before. It appears to be in rage. Ganga is very angry because we have polluted her’.

The women in the island have not heard about ‘Climate Change’ but they know the sea level is rising rapidly. “Our homes will be gulped. We will have to move, just as we had moved from Lohachura islands to Ghoramara two decades ago. There cannot be permanent homes in these islands. These lands will vanish soon. We are living like guests here”, explains Sushmita Pramanik, the wife of the Khashimara gram panchayat member Arun Pramanik. “If this be the situation gradually one day the sea will take away all the land of the world”, she adds.

The Pramaniks are wealthy in the small island. They have a pucca house where people take shelter during the flash floods at high tide times. But previously in the early nineties Arun Pramanik grew up in a nearby island Lohachura that has completely gone inside the water. They were amongst the first refugees of the rising sea. The then state government facilitated their rehabilitation in Ghoramara the nearby island spread over ten square kilometers for the new settlements to be made. The Pramanik sons now study in the city and the father, the panchayat member holds regular public meetings to apprise the people of the growing risk of living in the sinking land.

Ten thousand people were relocated from Lohachura to Ghoramara in 1995. Lohachura went completely under the sea in the year 2000, another island Supar bhangaha  also gradually gone within the water “due to sea level rise”.In the last three decades Ghoramara islands lost 7.6 square kilometers of land and its population of forty thousand people shrunk to now just 4000 people living in the land in the sea. “The islands have always been in danger since the rise in global warming. With the Ganga bed getting flooding as never before rivers are rising and it is true that in the last decade the erosion is faster than ever. We just have to understand the complexities and the challenge that needs to be addressed fast” explains Professor Sugata Hazra, noted oceanographer of Jadavpur University studying the sea level and disappearing islands of Sundarban delta. Professor Hazra explains that more than 80 square kilometers nearly half the size of Kolkata city has been submerged in the past three decades in the Sundarbans delta. The island at a distance of about 8.9 kilometers from Kakdwip, the nearby land point takes about an hour of ferry ride to reach. There are no hospitals and the sick, the old and pregnant women either have to be ferried to the nearest mainland or Sagar islands for any medical support. A few locally trained ASHA workers help child births at homes in the island.

Women and children seem to bear the burnt the most.Men flock to mainland to find jobs and explore possibilities of settling down while women and children remain back home to build homes after the aftermath of floods. Fifteen year old Sheikh Firoz a class eight drop out helps his mother clear the fallen coconut trees to make handmade mats (leafy mats)) touse them at home and also fix it as shades to combat the gush of water. Ashmina and Alima Khatoon both school drops outs have just learnt the art of making ‘huts’ for living.

Firoz says his only memory is to run at night if there is water. “I have known it since childhood. Every night I dream of being washed away so am always ready to run to the safest place at school.” Firoz’s father moved to the nearby island in Sagar to work as daily wage laborer. “When he finds home for us then we will shift”, he says.

Women with no homes, no livelihood and large scale fear of being washed away any day have learnt the art of hut building. They stack the hay, swab the floor polish the dry mud walls

and know perfectly how to raise the floor in case of the water gushing in.The prawn seed farming is no longer available due to the rise and fall of sea level in the scanty populated islands. Women now actively grow a few saline resistant variety of rice in the little paddy fields that is left for them. A flash flood can easily wash that away. The day to day needs are met ferrying in the only public launch that comes to pick up commuters.

The villagers have little possessions. They know there is nothing to accumulate. Some are waiting for new homes, some for the men who have migrated to come back and take them away.

Ghoramara has too little to offer. And it is time that the rest of country takes note of “India’s own set of Climate Refugees” waiting for homes.