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ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Rising Seas Threaten Bengal’s Deltaic People

Sujoy Dhar* - IPS/IFEJ

SAGAR ISLAND, West Bengal, Jun 4 2007 (IPS) - Just weeks ago Subodh Patra, a villager on the Indian Sunderbans, lost the crops on his one-acre farm to rising sea water. And now he and his family dare not sleep at night for fear that even their humble dwelling will be inundated.

“On May 16 morning sea waters gushed in, breached the embankments and inundated our fields with saline waters, destroying all our crops,” said Patra’s 23-year-old son Gopal. “We spend sleepless nights worrying that during high tide our dwellings would be devoured too.”

“With the crops gone we really don’t know what to do now,” said Gopal whose father fends for the family by practicing homeopathic medicine, and keeping poultry at Poilagheri village on Moushuni, one of the many threatened islands of the Sunderbans.

Looking helplessly at the farmland now infested with mosquitoes and poisonous snakes, Patra says: “Our island is famous for the production of good quality chilli besides other vegetables and crops. But all were lost that in the sea water.”

“We will have to do without fish too for the next one year with the (freshwater) ponds now filled with saline water,” he says.

Global warming and climate change are terms the Patra family had never heard of till the rising seas had begun to force him to join the thousands of prospective environmental refugees in the Sunderbans.

Home to the world’s largest mangrove gene pool and a World Heritage site as declared by UNESCO, the Sunderbans face a threat from global warming and attendant climatic change. It is estimated by a recently released United Nations study that a mere 45 cm rise in the sea level will destroy 75 percent of forests spread over a 10,000 sq km area in India’s eastern state of West Bengal and adjacent Bangladesh.

“There are already 7,000 environmental refugees in the Sunderbans and the numbers can only increase with the sea devouring more islands as a result of global warming and climate change,” said Prof. Pranabes Sanyal of the School of Oceanographic Studies in Jadavpur University (JU).

The JU wing had conducted a 10-year study in and around the Bay of Bengal and concluded that the sea is rising at 3.14 mm a year in the Sunderbans against a global average of 2 mm, threatening low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh.

“In places like east Sagar Island the sea is rising more due to easterly tilt of subsidence. The rise near the tiger habitat at Pakhiralay is at an average of 5 mm annually, while towards Khulna in Bangladesh it is 10 mm,” said Sanyal who is a member of the National Coastal Zone Management Authority.

The Sunderbans extend across southern Bangladesh and West Bengal in the vast delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers that empty themselves in the Bay of Bengal.

Mangroves of Sunderbans act as natural buffers against tropical cyclones and also as filtration systems for estuarine and fresh water. They also serve as nurseries for many marine invertebrate species and fish.

The shrinking mangrove will leave India and Bangladesh vulnerable to the effects of disturbances in the Bay of Bengal, including tsunamis.

In fact, the latest report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented in Bangkok, last month, has indicated the magnitude of the problem. “Further destruction of the Sunderban mangroves would diminish their critical role as natural buffers against tropical cyclones. The Bay of Bengal is heavily affected by tropical storms, about 10 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in this area and 17 percent of these sweep the land in Bangladesh,” the U.N. report said.

“At least 13 sea facing islands are very vulnerable,” says Prof. Sugato Hazra, director of the oceanographic department. “Embankments are breaching because of brick fields and rampant aquaculture along their boundaries.”

According to Sanyal as a result of the rising sea, the southern islands of the Sunderbans are subsiding and already three islands once abuzz with human populations have been completely devoured by the sea. “At Sagar Island we are losing 44 hectares of land every year. Even the Kapil Muni temple, the main attraction of the annual Gangasagar mela (fair) for Hindu pilgrims who take a ritual dip at the mouth of the river has had to shift the venue thrice because of the advancing sea,” Sanyal said.

The former environment officer said the rehabilitation process is slow and inadequate. “A person who is losing several acres of land can expect to get a small fraction of that as compensation,” he said.

The rich mangroves of Sunderbans are also shrinking. In two islands- Bhangaduani (also called Kendo) and Dalhousie – 15 and 30 percent of mangrove cover was lost in the past 37 years, experts said.

“What is alarming is that both these islands are excellent habitats of the famous Royal Bengal tigers. So there is a reduction in tiger land posing threat to the already threatened big cat population of India,” Sanyal said.

There was a huge concern about the tiger population in Sunderbans last year when data analysis of the 2004 tiger census in the Sunderbans by the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institute put the number of big cats at just 75 – way below the official number of 249.

According to environmentalists, besides the erosion and inundation effect, salt water incursion in ground water is posing yet another hazard to agriculture.

“The estuarine nursery for aquatic animals is also advancing upstream. Besides tiger, it was also found recently that the barking deer found in Halliday Island here has vanished,” said Sanyal.

In the space of about a century, six animal species have gone extinct in the region. Besides the barking deer, the Javan rhino (not found since 1935), the red-horned Rhino (last seen in 1900), wild buffalo, swamp deer and gharial (alligator species) have all vanished.

Conservations efforts are grossly inadequate. West Bengal’s Sunderbans affairs minister Kanti Ganguly said: “We have decided to raise the heights of the mud embankments and increase the mangrove cover.”

But people like Patra say they get little help from the local authorities.

Ayesha, an elderly resident of Moushuni Island who lost 3 acres of farmland to the sea, said tearfully: “We have not heard of any resettlement. No one ever visits here as no one cares if we live or die.”

(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service, and IFEJ – the International Federation of Environmental Journalists.)