Villagers struggle to save land as islands shrink in Sundarban

Imagine buying a plot of land only to see it vanishing into the river gradually after a few years!
Thousands of farmers living on the banks of the islands in Sundarbans are struggling to protect their land as their villages are shrinking in size due to rising sea levels induced by climate change.
As a child, 50-year-old farmer Sahadeb Guru recalls how while sitting on the banks of the island in Pathar Pratima he could hear people talking in the nearby island on the opposite side of the river.
Decades later, the river has widened so much that it now needs a binocular to find the island on the other side.

All these years, people living on both the islands have lost many acres of land due to heavy erosion, points out Chittapriyo Sadhu, project manager of NGO Save the Children.
Guru says he had to shift his house thrice in the last few decades and lost few bighas of land as the river keeps on eating into the island on a regular basis.
The story is the same for thousands of islanders living on the banks of the archipelago comprising over 100 islands. A three-hour drive from Kolkata, it is a complex network of streams, rivers, tidal creeks and channels.

Spread over an area of 9,630 sq km in India, Sundarbans has the world's largest mangrove forest and also hosts a Tiger Reserve and three wildlife sanctuaries.