SUNDARBANS/KOLKATA: Debi Miridha listens intently to our conversation with her neighbour Bhagirath Mandal as she unduly delays what she has come to do: freshen up at the pond next to Mandal’s house.With a towel on her shoulder and one end of her saree wrapped around her head to avert the merciless sun, she is only too glad to interrupt with responses to our questions. What is otherwise an annoyance is now quite welcome since Mandal is not very forthcoming and never stops looking at us with suspicion.To the unsuspecting urban eye, Miridha and Mandal’s village Dayapur in the Sundarbans, which is about a 100 km south of Kolkata, is idyllic, with its huts with thatched or tiled roofs, paddy fields and a languorous air, which has long been extinct in our cities. But appearances could not be more misleading.

Dayapur is not connected to the electricity grid and a few houses make do with a small solar panel atop their roofs; there are very few sources of fresh water; and the vestiges of cyclone Aila are wherever you turn — six years after it ravaged the region — on the flaky walls and in the canal water, whose salinity increased after the cyclone.

While Mandal builds river embankments or roads, sometimes under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Miridha puts her life at risk by collecting prawn seeds for a living.“People say you can make a lot of money in it, but I get just Rs 50 a day,” says the 45-year-old. Long a banned activity, prawn seed collection is the only source of income for many in the region, who are susceptible to attacks by tigers and crocodiles while doing it.Miridha does not have a choice though: “I used to do manual labour in Tamil Nadu last year and would get Rs 220 for working 12 hours a day, but I had to come back because of my kids and my husband, who cannot walk.”The Sundarbans, a delta which is part of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna river basin on the Bay of Bengal, is home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests, of about 10,200 sq km, which is seven times the size of Delhi.About 40% of that is in India and the rest in Bangladesh. There are 84 species of mangroves and mangrove associates. The total area of the Indian Sundarbans is about 9,630 sq km, including the mangroves.There are some 4.5 million people in the Indian Sundarbans and about 7.5 million people in Bangladesh. The region may have derived its name from Sundari mangroves (Heritiera fomes).The Indian Sundarbans, which is spread over the North 24 Parganas and South 24 Parganas districts, is home to 56 species of reptiles, 250 species of fish, 220 species of birds and also to the endangered Royal Bengal tiger. It was declared a reserve forest in 1928 and was among the first nine tiger reserves set up under Project Tiger in 1973.The core area of the reserve, which was made a national park in 1984, was recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1987.Two years later, the reserve along with the adjoining forests and areas of human settlements was declared the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, which focuses on both locals’ livelihoods and environmental sustainability.The delta was believed to have been formed 2,500-5,000 years ago by the silt carried by the Ganga and its tributaries.It is bounded by the imaginary Dampier-Hodges line drawn in 1829-1830 to its north, the Bay of Bengal to its south, the Hooghly river to its west and the Ichamati-Raimangal rivers to its east. The rivers here are saline thanks to the sea water which enters through the hundreds of creeks and channels during high tide.“In some cases, the salinity in rivers is as high as in the sea,” says Biswajit Roy Chowdhury, secretary, Nature, Environment & Wildlife Society (NEWS), a Kolkatabased non-governmental organisation which has been active in the Sundarbans since 1998.The Indian Sundarbans is a seriously impoverished region, with half the population living below the poverty line, which makes conservation efforts all the more difficult.Also, more than two-thirds do not have access to safe water, and only 17% of the population are connected to the electricity grid, according to a 2014 World Bank report.A fifth of the population get only one meal a day and for a third of them, it is a sub-standard one.Moreover, half the children suffer from malnutrition. Poor environmental conditions cause 3,800 premature deaths and 1.9 million cases of illness every year, primarily among children and adult women.About 85% of the people rely on paddy cultivation for their livelihood. Agriculture here is rain-fed, given the saline rivers. Life here is made harder by the fact that the mercury shoots up to north of 45 degree celsius in summer and plummets to 7 degree celsius in winter.“The harsh conditions pose difficulties for every living organism,” says Pradeep Vyas, director of the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve.As our motorboat traverses the waters of the Durgadhwani river, it is difficult to picture a cyclone laying waste to this place.A ferry boat with more people than ideal and another with just one passenger; a bunch of school kids walking on an elevated village road, which from our boat seems like a thin wire, lending the kids an air of daredevilry; and shirtless men smoking beedis and shooting the breeze at a small kirana store.These are images which limit your ability to imagine the worst. But as perfect as this tableau may seem, the Sundarbans is not immune to nature’s wrath.According to a 2011 report by the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, cyclones have become more common in the Sundarbans over the last 120 years. The most devastating in recent history was cyclone Aila. It hit the Sundarbans on May 25, 2009 and left 190 people dead and affected 3.8 million in India and Bangladesh. Over 2,40,000 houses were decimated and 3,70,000 partially damaged.While earlier storms used to hit the Sundarbans in July-October, now they can be witnessed in other months, too, like the rains. Were it not for the mangroves, which by some estimates reduce wind speeds by up to 90%, the region would be far worse off. Moreover, they act as a protective barrier to Kolkata.Mangroves, half of which have disappeared globally since the mid-20th century, are highly adaptive salt-tolerant plants that grow along tidal estuaries.They are considered one of the most complex biological — and most threatened — ecosystems in the world. They manage to keep most of the salt out thanks to an efficient filteration system and some have ‘breathing roots’ called pneumatophores that grow above the soil to take in oxygen.The ecological significance of mangrove forests, which are said to have originated in southeast Asia, is on many accounts. They are nurseries for many kinds of fish, shrimp, crustaceans and molluscs and act as life support to three-fourths of the fish caught in that area.They also make the coastline stronger by holding on to sediments in the river. Moreover, their wood is used as fuel and in construction. Their leaves are tapped for animal fodder. Some mangroves also have medicinal properties. It is for this reason that despite a ban on mangrove destruction, officials and locals admit that it still does happen on a small scale since the people here have few alternatives.But they sure know mangroves are lifesavers. “People are more aware of the importance of mangroves after Aila. They even plant mangroves,” says Indrajit Jana of Sonagaon village.While he was away working in the Andaman & Nicobar islands, his family had to wade through neck-deep water to survive. But they were not as lucky with their house, very little of which remained. It took his family two months to rebuild their home with the Rs 10,000 they got from the government.Besides the government, there are several NGOs which have urged the local population to plant mangroves. In the last five years, NEWS has planted over 5,500 hectares of mangroves with the help of 182 village panchayats. About 30,000 women are involved in the process and nearly 120 guards were paid to protect the mangroves.Chowdhury believes planting more mangroves is the way to beef up embankments, which are 3,500-km long. When a line of mangroves is planted, when high tide recedes, their roots absorb alluvium from the water, which create a new layer of natural embankments. But wherever you go in the Sundarbans, it will be hard to miss the bricks alongside mangroves on natural embankments. Near one of the villages, we find labourers on a boat throwing bricks into the water during high tide, which will then be collected and placed on the embankments during low tide.Anurag Danda, head, Sundarbans Programme, WWF-India, says a lot of the embankments were originally built when land was reclaimed. “Embankments are now the responsibility of the irrigation department which does not have the expertise [to deal with them],” he notes. He draws a comparison with the Netherlands, which literally means ‘lowlying country’. About 6,500 km of land in the Netherlands is reclaimed and the country is protected from the North Sea and rivers by its dykes, dams and dunes.“They allowed the water to come in and deposit silt, but here the idea of embankments is to keep the water out for agriculture. If we had allowed the silt to settle, the land would have built itself and been much higher,” Danda adds.Between 1969 and 2009, the Sundarbans lost 210 sq km of land and the future is not any brighter. About 250 sq km of a previously productive zone will be lost in the next 5-10 years thanks to coastal erosion, cyclones and estuary changes, as per the World Bank report, which also says the annual cost of environmental damage could range from Rs 344 crore to Rs 1,065 crore.The sea level in the region is expected to rise 3-8 mm every year. WWF estimates that 1.35 million people, or a third of the population, are presently at high risk, and 2.4 million at moderate risk.Danda believes that if we do not provide the local population the basic amenities and alternative livelihoods, we cannot morally object to their indifference to the environment. He adds: “We are not addressing the implications of all these people landing up on the outskirts of Kolkata.”He advocates a three pronged approach: organically depopulating the region by providing the people some skills with which they can earn a living elsewhere; ensuring the land vacated by these people is not occupied by others; and helping those who choose to stay back in the Sundarbans.Both human inhabitation and climate change have put several fauna in the region at risk. Among the species to have become extinct in the Sundarbans in the 20th century are the Asiatic wild buffalo (1910), swamp deer (1930), hog deer (1945) and barking deer (1976). On the endangered list now are the fishing cat, gangetic dolphin, white-rumped vulture and the leatherback sea turtle.While the Royal Bengal tiger is also endangered, as per the government’s latest tiger estimation, the Sundarbans had 76 of them in 2014 compared to 70 in 2010. Sundarbans has been lauded for its tiger conservation efforts.The tigers of the region are unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the country. “We have noticed that the tigers here are lighter and shorter because they have to work very hard for every meal. The tigers here are great swimmers, easily crossing 18-km channels,” notes Vyas, who was earlier director of the Sundarban Tiger Reserve and holds a PhD on the Sundarbans.Tiger conservation aside, activists say it has been business as usual for the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government in the Sundarbans post-Aila. Neither Manturam Pakhira, minister for Sundarban Affairs, nor secretary Nandini Chakravorty was available for comment.The Department of Sundarban Affairs spent Rs 201 crore in 2013-14 against the approved outlay of Rs 275 crore. In 2014-15, it was allocated Rs 300 crore in the state budget. The Sundarban Biosphere Reserve spent Rs 14.73 crore in 2013-14 and Rs 9.05 crore in the previous fiscal year. Besides the minimal funding, the Sundarban Biosphere Reserve’s efforts are undermined by a serious staff shortage.“There are 200 forest guards sanctioned but we have a 40% vacancy. People are retiring and a lot of them are over 50 years old,” says Vyas. The guards are stretched thin by activities ranging from protection of wildlife and the forest to organising medical camps to overseeing the building of jetties and irrigation channels.But there are threats beyond the control of the guards like pollution outside the Sundarbans. The WWF report says that domestic and industrial effluents and contaminated mud from dredging in Haldia, an industrial port town not far from Kolkata, are carried by tributaries to the Sundarbans, thereby adversely affecting its ecology.“The Sundarbans delta has become susceptible to chemical pollutants such as heavy metals, organochlorine pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which may have changed the estuary’s geochemistry and affected the local coastal environment,” adds the report.In December, an oil tanker crashed with another vessel and spilled 3,50,000 litres of oil into a dolphin sanctuary in Sela river in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh.In response to reports on the environmental degradation and unchecked commercial development in the Sundarbans, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in December took suo motu cognizance of the issue and in January issued orders to the Kolkata government to put a stop to the following activities: illegal brick kilns (in South 24 Parganas, there are 22 legal and 88 illegal brick kilns); encroachment of mangroves for private construction; illegal construction even by statutory authorities; felling of trees by inhabitants; prawn seed collection, which has been long banned; use of adulterated oil on boats; and building of illegal dikes for fishing.Ajanta Dey, joint secretary of NEWS, who is on the monitoring committee set up by the NGT, says the objective behind setting up the Department of Sundarban Affairs in the 1980s was to coordinate between the 15 different government departments like forest, public works department, irrigation and fisheries, but it has in turn created its own divisions for these departments.“About 20 years ago, the government encouraged aquaculture around mangroves but later realised its mistake,” she notes, adding that activities detrimental to the Sundarbans cannot be justified in the name of poverty. Vyas calls for a coordination of a different kind: “The government does not know what NGOs and researchers are doing there. For instance, if four different institutions are working on similar research, there is waste of money and stress on the system.”Also needed is cooperation between India and Bangladesh. “The West Bengal government is trying to build conservation efforts with Bangladesh, but it is very cumbersome since permissions have to be taken from foreign and defence ministries,” says Chowdhury.For a region with a dedicated minister, the Sundarbans has not seen nearly as much development or commitment to conservation by the West Bengal government as it ought to have.Environmental conservation was not a top priority for the Left Front, which ruled the state for 34 years, nor is it for the Trinamool Congress, which has been in power since 2011.But both the state and central governments would do well to realise that the threats to the Sundarbans from climate change, pollution and shortsighted development and conservation are not going to materialise in the distant future but are already very much upon us.