After the storm
In the small hours of 25 May 2009, tropical cyclone Aila swept across the southern part of West Bengal and Bangladesh, with wind speeds up to 110 kph, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
It travelled across the Sundarbans, a tidal delta at the mouth of 3 rivers, with one of the largest mangrove forests in the world. The Sundarbans has a national park and biosphere reserve, and is the last remaining habitat of the Bengal Tiger.
It is also home to over 4 million people. Aila left more than a million of them staring at an uncertain future.
The vast mangrove forest of the Sundarbans has long acted as a natural buffer against the elements. To one side is the sea, with its tides and storms; to the other is one of the most densely populated parts of the world.
In the Sundarbans region itself, the area outside the reserve is home to about 4.5 million people, spread over 19 administrative blocks across 54 islands. The problems they face are often summed up in 3 Gs: Geography, Geology and the Government.
The geographical challenges include tidal waves, mud-flats, mangrove forests and rivers which cut the land from North to South: in remote islands, it can take hours to travel even a short distance by van, rickshaw and boat. The geology is to do with the active delta: rivers bring silt all the way from the Himalayas and cause sedimentation and erosion. As for the government: the state capital, Kolkata, isn’t far away as the crow flies — but there’s a long history of apathy and neglect of the Sundarbans from the authorities there, especially in addressing poverty, health and nutrition.
After Aila
The day after the cyclone hit, islanders were found lined up on the embankment pleading, shouting and jostling with each other for relief and aid. In the weeks that followed, many others, having lost their land, houses, and family members, started to move out of the Sundarbans in search of an uncertain future in Kolkata.
Immediately after Aila, the West Bengal State Government and many NGOs began to respond by providing aid on a war footing. However, materials were often in short supply, or never reached the people who needed them.
Life here is marked by uncertainty. Huge natural disasters like Aila, while on an almost unimaginable scale, are not the only forces that affect island life. Aside from dealing with the three Gs of geography, geology and the government, people here are living with uncertainty in how they get access to reliable healthcare, food and safe water. Their views and responses to uncertainty are often very different from the way that government officials and experts understand the challenges they face.
Researchers from the STEPS Centre and the Indian Institute of Health Management and Research have been working with the islanders, seeking to understand their perspectives, at a time when media and government attention has all but faded away.
As part of the research, cameras were given to women in remote villages, allowing them to take snapshots of their surroundings. Along with the photos they took, the women noted down their observations about what was important to them — their housing, work or everyday frustrations with waterlogged roads or unreliable sea defences — as well as their ways of adapting to ecological change, and their aspirations for the future.
Keeping the sea at bay
According to local tradition, the guardian spirit Bonbibi (queen of the forest), venerated by both Hindus and Muslims, protects the people against tigers and other perils of the jungle. But other forms of protection are needed too, particularly from the power of the sea and the elements.
Rising sea levels, ever more frequent thunderstorms and erosion have inundated large areas over the last 20 years. The Sundarbans archipelago has over 3,000 km of human-made embankments, of which a tiny proportion have been built up with concrete. But breaches are common, and the performance of government departments entrusted with building up the embankments is patchy at best.
Land has been acquired to protect the embankments, but with no comprehensive programme to compensate locals or offer them opportunities to relocate.
This has led to some farmers being reluctant to hand over their lands, as they don’t expect to be compensated. After one temporary embankment was built, labourers and farmers were not paid for their work. The term ‘ostityahin’ (‘exclude’) comes up, time and time again, in conversations with the islanders, particularly those living near the river or the sea.
Still, the embankments are important for survival in the Sundarbans. Without them, people would literally be inundated by the sea at high tide. The solutions offered by experts are often highly technical and expensive, with much debate about how feasible different options are. Local experience and knowledge tends to be disregarded. The question is how to construct the embankments in a locally appropriate manner, building on the experiences and views of local women and men.
‘Silent killers’
Now, almost six years after the cyclone hit, its effects are still deeply felt. Long after most authorities, relief agencies and media have retreated, silent killers — malnutrition, disease and poverty — are still present.
Drinking water was hit badly by the storm. Saraju Mandal, a resident of Dakshin Kashinagar village, remembers that it took eight days after Aila’s departure for the floodwater to recede from their village. Almost a year later, seawater still invaded their land during high tide. Cows, goats and hens were inevitably washed away — at a time when people were trying to rebuild their lives with whatever little was doled out by the government and non-government agencies in the aftermath.
“Worse still, all our drinking water sources became contaminated and the saline water entered ponds, killing the fish we villagers had reared as a major source of livelihood. Yes, we were helped with tarpaulin sheets, dry food and some money after Aila, but that did not solve the drinking water problem, which persists to this day,” says Mandal. “The entire village, especially the children, suffer from some gastro-intestinal complication or the other.”
What happens when people fall ill?
Chandni*, who lives in G-Plot, takes her sick child to the Indrapur Primary Health Centre at the very south of Patharpratima Block, the nearest public health facility to her home. There she finds there is no doctor, so she has to take the child to the Block Primary Health Centre. There are two routes she might take. The first involves taking a van up to the ferry ghat (a set of steps descending to the river), crossing the river, taking a van again to another ghat, crossing the river again and then finally reaching the health centre. The journey takes about two-and-a-half hours.
Travelling this route in the daytime costs around 46 rupees. But her child falls ill in the evening, and at night, the fare adds up to Rs 1,200. An alternative route is quicker, but costs twice as much. It’s impossible to raise the cash at short notice, so Chandni takes her son to the local Rural Medical Practitioner, who will give her red, green and blue pills for her child and not ask for immediate payment. RMPs don’t have the same level of qualifications or training as hospital doctors, but are located in the villages and willing to provide medicines and treatment on credit.
More than a third of the children of the Indian Sundarbans are chronically malnourished. Environment-linked ailments, according to a 2013 study, make up the major share of the illnesses they suffer from.
Of the cases that had required hospitalisation in the 30 days before the study, 37 per cent were related to gastro-intestinal complaints, 31 per cent to respiratory infection and 32 per cent to other complaints. The culled data suggested that 0.3 million children would be ill in a month and 26,000 children would need hospitalisation in one year in the Sundarbans.
Where the sea meets the land
More than half of people living in the villages of the Sundarbans are landless, but almost the entire population depends on agriculture. Though the region receives ample rainfall, mostly during the monsoon months of June to September, agricultural productivity is low. Every time embankments are breached, the salty sea water damages the fertility of the land. On top of that, numerous natural disasters — earthquakes and cyclones such as Aila — have caused widespread devastation to human settlements, and have claimed many lives and much farmland.
After Aila, the salt content of the land has risen sharply, which — along with erosion — has made it less productive, and forced hundreds of people to abandon decades-old farms. Fishing, another important occupation, has also been hit, with the fish migrating to cooler waters.
A lack of industry, food insecurity and damage to land has caused people to seek alternative sources of food.
As the Sundarbans is a protected area and a National Park, some islanders’ activities have been seen as detrimental to the conservation of the bio-diversity of the delta, and many traditional livelihoods such as fishing are subjected to restrictions and bans. With men away fishing for long periods of time, or migrating to nearby cities, women have turned to collecting prawn seeds. Children join in crab collections — a new activity since Aila.
Different views, different stories
The gulf between official responses to climate change and natural disasters, and the lived experience of people on the islands of the Sundarbans, is huge. Expert views and local understandings might seem difficult, if not impossible to reconcile.
But looking at the daily lives of islanders, and hearing their experiences and knowledge, could help experts and policy makers to understand how to deal with the human cost of events like Aila — not just in the immediate aftermath, where villagers are standing on embankments reaching out for food or safety, but in the long, slow process of rebuilding and adaptation over many years. The STEPS Centre research project is revealing how the islanders have learned to live with a range of uncertainties. It is those stories of resilience that experts in Delhi and Kolkata need to listen to and build upon.
The STEPS Centre’s ‘Uncertainty from below’ project examines how people respond to uncertainty about climate, disease or natural disasters, looking at three areas — the Sundarbans, Kutch (a dryland area of India) and Delhi.
The project looks at the contrasts between official, expert understandings, and the views of people directly affected by the consequences of ecological uncertainty. To find out more, visit the ‘Uncertainty from below’ project page on the STEPS website.
This story was compiled with text and advice from Shibaji Bose and Lyla Mehta.
*names have been changed
