Villagers forced into forests
SATJELIA, India - On a warm November afternoon, Parul Haldar balanced precariously on the bow of a small wooden dinghy, pulling in a long net flecked with fish from the swirling brown river.
Just behind her loomed the dense forest of the Sundarbans, where some 10,000 square km of tidal mangroves straddle India’s northeastern coastline and western Bangladesh and open into the Bay of Bengal.
Four years ago, her husband disappeared on a fishing trip deep inside the forest. Two fishermen with him saw his body being dragged into the undergrowth — one of a rising number of humans killed by tigers as they venture into the wild.
That Ms Haldar, a single mother of four, is taking such risks is testament to growing economic and ecological pressures on more than 14 million people living on the Indian and Bangladeshi sides of the low-lying Sundarbans.
They have led to a reduced dependence on agriculture, a rising number of migrant workers and, for those like Ms Haldar who can’t leave the delta to work elsewhere, a reliance on the forests and rivers to survive.
“When I enter a dense forest, I feel like I’m holding my life in my hands,” said the 39-year-old, sitting outside her ramshackle three-room home on the Indian island of Satjelia after returning from a fishing expedition.
In the small yard, her father and some friends smoked wood to use it for building a new boat.
Ms Haldar fishes in the river most days. Twice a month, she travels deeper into the forests to catch crabs, rowing six hours on a rickety boat along with her mother and staying in the undergrowth for several days.
Almost all of the 2000 rupees ($27) she makes each month to run her household and send her youngest daughter, Papri, to school comes from fishing and crabbing. Her elderly father and other relatives look after the girl while she is gone.
“If I don’t go to the jungle, I won’t have enough food to eat,” said Ms Haldar.
It is 11-year-old Papri who keeps Ms Haldar on the Sundarbans rather than seeking work elsewhere. If she goes, there’s no one to take care of the child, she said.
“No matter how hard it is, I want to educate her.”
Life has been getting harder in the
Sundarbans. Many of the islands lie below the high-tide water level, meaning homes and farms are often protected by earthen embankments that are frequently breached.
With every rupture, rivers swallow up more land and inundate fields with saline water, wilting crops and rendering plots infertile for months.
And as climate change pushes up sea surface temperatures, the cyclonic storms that barrel in from the Bay of Bengal have become fiercer and more frequent, particularly in the last decade, researchers said.
An analysis of 1891-2010 data showed the Indian Sundarbans saw a 26 per cent rise in tropical storms, with the frequency spiking in the last decade, according to a 2020 paper in the Environment, Development and Sustainability journal by researchers from the Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi.
These more powerful cyclones bring bigger storm surges which can smash through, or rise over embankments, causing widespread damage, a phenomenon not limited to the Sundarbans.
“I think the diverse environmental assaults we’re seeing in the Sundarbans are also occurring in many coastal wetlands globally,” said William Laurance, a Distinguished Research Professor at Australia’s James Cook University.
“These ecosystems appear to be caught in a vicious vice - between rising sea levels and intensifying storms on the one side and rapid land-use change and intensifying human uses on the other.”
In May, Cyclone Amphan crashed into the Sundarbans, bringing winds of 133 km (83 miles) per hour, killing dozens of people, flattening thousands of homes and destroying embankments. More damaging weather followed.