The climate refugees: Sundarban seas sink islands, render people homeless

About three years ago when Sabina woke up one morning to see her farm disappear, it was no surprise to her. She had been anticipating this for long. The swelling river first washed away her land, then her home at Ghoramara, the sinking island of the Sundarbans.    

After the deluge, Sabina and her family were forced to move to a mud house in the nearby Sagar Island, the putative refugee capital of the Sundarbans. In the absence of any employment opportunities in the area, Sabina’s husband migrated to Kerala to work as a construction worker. Then, last year, Sabina’s husband stopped sending money home and went missing. Sabina has now resorted to begging for a living. 

Her plight depicts how climate change is no longer in the future, but a lived reality of many people in the Sunderbans. With a steady rise in sea level and vast swathes of land going under water in the Sundarbans, a refugee crisis is in the making.

According to a 2002 study by Sugata Hazra, a professor at the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, the total erosion in the Sundarbans over a 30-year span, estimated through a time series analysis between 1969 and 2001, was nearly 163 square km—roughly the size of Washington DC.

Over the past five decades, at least four islands — Lohacara, Bedford, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga—have completely disappeared. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates 6,000 families have been rendered homeless because of this, according to a study published in 2010.

What is imminently worrisome is the increased pace of erosion in recent years. With thousands facing the prospect of displacement, the refugee crisis in the region is set to reach a tipping point faster than once perceived.

Multiple factors have contributed to this precipitated erosion. Post Aila, a severe tropical storm that hit the Sundarbans in 2009, the embankments were damaged severely. According to official estimates, out of the 3,122  km of embankment, nearly 778 km was damaged by Aila. However, the actual breach was much more, and the erosion remained a continuous process after Aila.

Ten years later, nearly all of the 54 inhabited islands of Sundarbans within India are shielded intermittently by broken and crumbling walls, while a maze of rivers overflow and wash away land parcels in bits and pieces.  

“Most of the embankments in the Sundarbans were built during the British era and steadily they started losing ground from the core. The cost of rebuilding is huge,” says Dipankar Roy, director, Tagore Society for Rural Development, engaged in development work in the region.

Most of the efforts to reconstruct the embankment go in vain as they break even before the work is completed, according to a government official at the block development office in Namkhana, a block in the Sundarban area.

“To add to the woes, the severity of sea has increased manifold rendering the completion work impossible. Land acquisition poses another problem,” says the government official.

The constant clearance of mangroves for human settlement has further exacerbated erosion in recent years, says Roy. Mangroves help keep the soil stitched together, thus preventing erosion.

Among the inhabited islands of the Indian Sundarbans, Ghoramara faces imminent end. Its area shrank from 2,500 hectare about 60 years ago to about 216 hectare at present.

Close to 4,200 residents at Ghoramara are on the brink of becoming environment refugees. According to a government official, only 35 most vulnerable families, or about 150 people, living on the banks, are in the list of possible resettlement plan.

With a gleeful smile, Abhimanyu Mondal, well in his 60s, sits on a rickety wooden chair and checks the daily register of mails at the Mud Point post office at Ghoramara. He has been working at the post office for the last 35 years, and never had the luxury of having an electric fan as the island still does not have electricity. Yet a bright red punkha, a manually-fluttered cloth fan suspended to a ceiling atop his table reminds of the luxuries of the kingly era. A storage trunk, rusted and flaked, once used to store currency, lies abandoned in a corner.

The manual fan and trunk are the antiques from the old Mud Point post office, which holds the glory of being the second telegram office in West Bengal, established in the year 1853. However, the present façade of the office is not the original construct.The old building, along with a watch tower, has long gone under the water.

Mondal has witnessed many homes drown, several families becoming homeless and once wealthy farmers reduced to daily wagers over more than three decades. However, he has been never so worried as he is today.  

A Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model, a mathematical model to assess potential impacts of long-term sea level rise on wetlands and shorelines, suggests that Ghoramara will disappear by 2050, according to Hazra. 

However, locals fear the end might come sooner. “I have been witnessing Ghoramara sinking for the last 35 years. But for the last five years, the erosion is exceptionally steep. At this pace, the island will vanish in five years,” says Mondal.

The vertical slicing of land at the shores of Ghoramara is a tip-off to this premonition. “In the last four to five years, the erosion is so extreme that now it seems that the island may sink in the next three to four years itself,” says Satyajit Meta, an employee at the local village administration office at Ghoramara.

Manmade structures in the vicinity are only adding to the problem. Sanjeev Sagar, the village council head at Ghoramara, says erosion has been particularly steep at the north-east fringes of the island in the last few years. Few year ago, shipping route from India to Bangladesh was diverted towards the north-east of Ghoramara. Earlier, the ships used to ply from the western fringes of Nayachar, an island to the west of Ghoramara. However, the bouldering work to create the new shipping channel was left incomplete , causing the waves to hit the shores of Ghoramara with heightened force, says Sagar.

Hazra agrees this vehicular flow has precipitated erosion at Ghoramara and it is only a matter of time before it vanishes altogether.

“The government has given up the efforts to restore the island as the erosion has been massive and no amount of embankment can save Ghoramara from sinking,” says a government official.

According to government data, close to 4,000 people from the lost islands of Sundarbans have migrated to Sagar Island since the 1960s under different government resettlement schemes. At the same time, many more who did not get any assistance from government also migrated in thousands to the island, according to a senior government official.

Between 2001 and 2011, Sagar’s population density increased from 658 per square km to nearly 750 per square km, according to latest Census data. The resettlement at Sagar Island has so far happened in  phases, with the refugees spread over five colonies.  Those who moved to the island in the 1980s, a comprehensive package, inclusive of land and houses, was provided by the government.  Others got a piece of land, and some got it along with a matching grant to build houses under various government housing schemes.

Subhash Jana, who migrated to Sagar about six years ago received a grant of Rs 80,000 from the government to build a house. He took a loan of Rs 80,000 from a moneylender as the cost of building the house was close to Rs 1.6 lakh. Every month he has to pay Rs 4,000 as the monthly installment for the loan. However, with a daily income not more than Rs 200 as farm labourer, he has been struggling to pay the debt, whereas his house remains half constructed.

“The debt has ruined my life.  Most of whatever little I earn goes in paying the debt,” he says.

Apart from agriculture, there are no employment opportunities in the area. Due to rising salinity, even agriculture income is shrinking, leading to indebtedness and widespread poverty.

“Heavy migration to Sagar is not sustainable  as parts of the island itself are facing very steep erosion and salination,” says Abhijit Mitra, professor, department of marine science, Calcutta University.  

But despite the imminent threat, people of Ghoramara continue to cherish their connection to the land. Kanai Bhuyian is certain his second house will be submerged any day, just as the first one a few years ago. But his fighting spirit is intact. “My father fought the waves, now I will fight it,” he says.