Candidates have no answer to people’s queries on submergence

Sankar Sahu might be voting for the last time on Ghoramara island in Sunderbans archipelago as the rising sea level owing to climate change threatens his mud house located on the river bank.

“In one year’s time, my house will be gobbled up by the rising water level,” Mr. Sahu (37), who had shifted his house three times over the last few decades, told The Hindu.

“Hundreds of families have left the island and taken shelter elsewhere. They have become refugees. But we have no place to go,” said S.K. Mubarak Ali, another resident of the island.

The question Mr. Ali, Mr. Sahu and about 3,500 other voters on the sinking island ask the candidates of Trinamool Congress and Communist Party of India (Marxist) is: what are the political parties doing to save Ghoramara? But they have got no answers so far.

Ghoramara, an island at the confluence of river Hooghly and Bay of Bengal in the State’s South 24 Parganas district with a population of about 5,000, is spread over 5,000 bighas of land. (Three bighas is equal to one acre)

There is no electricity on the island and solar panels are fitted on the top of nearly every kutcha house here. A few trips by a motorised boat is the only means of transport here and 60 per cent of child births here are at home. Despite school and other infrastructure facilities, barring a few, most government officials are not keen on working on the island.

Sanjib Sagar, pradhan of Ghoramara Gram Panchayat, led by the Trinamool Congress, who was busy getting photocopies of electoral rolls a few days before elections, emphasised that the people of the island were becoming climate change refugees.

“The area of the island was about 22,000 bighas, and now it is reduced to 5,000 bighas. Many families from here have taken shelter on Sagar (another Island),” the gram pradhan said, adding many were not aware of the plight of the people here.

Climate change and the rising sea level, frequent storms threaten not only Ghoramara but also the entire Sunderbans that is spread across Mathurapur and Joynagar constituencies in the South 24 Parganas district and Basirhat in North 24 Parganas.

“Indian Sundarbans Delta: A Vision”, a report prepared by the School of Oceanographic Studies of Jadavpur University with World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), estimates that nearly one million people would become climate change refugees by the year 2050. The report suggests a planned retreat from vulnerable areas and planting of mangroves in those areas.

Another report independently conducted by School of Oceanographic Studies had estimated that 15 per cent of Sunderbans would sink by 2020. Besides Ghoramara, other islands such as Mousuni, and even bigger ones like Sagar may disappear.

Anurag Danda, head climate change and adaptation, WWF India, said despite the development and the growth dialogue raging on, the issue of displacement because of accelerated erosion in the Sunderbans had not got any attention during the polls. Referring to a fifth assessment report of working group II of Inter-governmental panel of climate change, Mr. Danda said in the next 50 years Kolkata would become most vulnerable city to climate change in Asia.

Tarun Kanti Naskar, MLA from Joynagar in Sunderbans area, admitted that climate change and its ramifications “hardly become a poll issue” in any election in West Bengal.

Very little has been done after cyclone Aila hit the Sunderbans in May 2009 and left lakhs of people displaced there, he added.