By Somini Sengupta
Published: April 10, 2007
GHORAMARA ISLAND, India: Shyamal Mandal lives at the edge of ruin.
In front of his small mud house lies the wreckage of what was once his village. Half of it has sunk into the sea. Only a handful of families cling on so close to the water today, surrounded as they are by reminders of inexorable destruction: a half-broken canoe left by someone who moved away; a coconut palm teetering on a cliff; the gouged-out remnants of a family's fish pond.
All that stands between Mandal's home and the water is a rudimentary mud embankment, and there is no telling, he confessed, when it, too, might fall away. "What will happen next we don't know," he said, summing up his only certainty.
The sinking of Ghoramara Island can be attributed to a confluence of disasters, both natural and human, not least the rising sea.
In concert with global warming, the rivers that pour down from the Himalayas and empty into the Bay of Bengal have swelled and shifted in recent decades, placing these already fragile islands, known as the Sundarbans, in the mouth of daily danger.
Climate Change
Environmental policy, global warming and the impact of human activity.
A recent study by Sugata Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in nearby Calcutta, found that during the last 30 years, roughly 80 square kilometers, or 31 square miles, of the Sundarbans have disappeared. More than 600 families have been displaced, according to the local government authorities. Fields and ponds have been submerged.
Ghoramara alone has shrunk to under five square kilometers, about half its size in 1969, Hazra's study concluded. In the last 20 years, two other islands have vanished entirely.
The Sundarbans are among the world's largest collection of river delta islands. In geological terms, they are young and still under formation, cut by an intricate network of streams and tributaries that straddle the border between India and Bangladesh. Ever since the British settled the Sundarbans 150 years ago in pursuit of timber, the mangroves have been steadily depleted, half of the islands have lost their forest cover and the population has grown.
Today, sea rise and deforestation threaten the Sundarbans' most storied inhabitant, the Royal Bengal tiger, which drinks these salty waters and has a peculiar appetite for human flesh. Environmental degradation also threatens the unsung human residents: Four million people live here on the Indian side of the border alone.
Certainly, nature would have forced these islands to shift size and shape, drowning some, giving rise to others. But there is little doubt, scientists say, that human-induced climate change has made them particularly vulnerable.
The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that global warming, spurred by the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could raise the ocean's surface by up to 23 inches, or nearly .6 of a meter, by 2100. According to its latest report, made public this month, the ecology and people of this river delta system are among the most vulnerable in the world.
Climate change is destined to make India as a whole prone to more intense rainstorms in the future, raising the risk of floods and, ultimately, bearing dangerously on agriculture, which still sustains two-thirds of the population.
It hardly seems to matter that Mandal and his neighbors, farmers and fishermen, are far too poor to produce much in the way of carbon emissions. They feel the assault already.
Mandal stood in his yard and pointed to the water. In his mind's eye, he could still see the two islands that have already sunk into the sea. And there, he said, on what was then the outer edge of Ghoramara, was his old house, and the paddy fields and vegetable patch that he had cultivated with his own hands. Today, there is only water.
Over the years, as the earth cracked and fell into the water, people on Ghoramara began moving farther inland. Mandal was among them. He built himself a new house here, in what was then the safe midsection of the island. He wonders where he will move now.
Hundreds of families have already been forced into a displaced people's camp on a neighboring island, called Sagar, which itself has shrunk by four square kilometers in the last five years, according to the Jadavpur study.
Even as India swiftly prospers, the Sundarbans have been left with little to no protection and none of the measures that wealthy low-lying countries, like the Netherlands, have undertaken to deal with the ravages of the sea.
Every year, at least two cyclones pound the islands; scientists say they have grown increasingly intense, though less frequent.
The mud embankments built over the years around these young, fragile islands are too feeble to keep away the tide. One storm and one breach can destroy a lifetime's labor on the land.
"Nature didn't create this place for humans to cut the forests and chase out the tigers and wildlife," said Tushar Kanjilal, founder of the Tagore Society for Rural Development, one of the most established nonprofit groups working on the islands. "We are killing the Sundarbans. Our government, the people themselves, we are all together killing it. After 50 years, will they exist?"
Yudisthir Bhuiyan fled to Sagar when, one day during the equinoctial high tide, the river surged and broke through the mud embankment that was expected to shield his village.
His house collapsed. Cows and chickens were washed away. The family had no time to gather belongings. They lived like refugees on the roadside until the government settled them in a small patch of land on Sagar, far from the water. Eventually, the island where his home once was vanished completely. Bhuiyan makes his living as a day laborer now.
At low tide, it is possible to see the mudflats that represent Ghoramara's vanishing past. At one tip of the island is a palm tree that drowns during high tide. There are embankments behind embankments, futile efforts of islanders to keep the water at bay.
Where once there was Bhuiyan's bustling island, called Lohachara, there is only water and a ship passing by. A new mudflat is visible now, just ahead of Mandal's house, where mangroves are beginning to sprout. Mandal regards it as his only salvation, a would-be buffer against the tide.
To nurse hope like this is also to know despair.
Sheikh Suleman, now nearing 60, remembers when life was good. He was a young man then, and the labor of his great grandfather, who settled here in the Sundarbans, bore a life of bounty for the family. "There was fish," he said. "There was land. We lacked for nothing."
He was a young man when he noticed people beginning to leave the edge of Ghoramara. The water had begun to eat the land, is how he put it. In two years, several dozen mud houses collapsed and washed away. He stared at the water each day. He looked for cracks in his land, the first sign of breakage. He built a new boundary wall.
Then, when danger seemed imminent, with only eight meters, or 25 feet, of land left in front of his doorstep, he decided to move. "One day it can just wash away," Suleman said. On Sagar Island, the government gave him enough land for a one-room hut and a fish pond. He survives today largely on the earnings of two sons, who work in nearby Calcutta.
There was a time, he recalled, when his own coconut harvest was so plentiful that his wife would give the nuts freely to their neighbors. Now, he said, she has to beg for a coconut. His eyes welled up with tears
