It’s a Sunday morning, but Jyotirindra Narayan Lahiri is busy. In a corner room of his apartment in Hooghly district, the 50-year-old is poring over the first map of the Sundarbans prepared by Major James Rennel in 1778.
“This is the first authentic map of the Sundarbans based on a survey by the British. This map shows mangroves extending right up to Kolkata. So much has changed since then,” Lahiri says, his finger tracing the map. Straddling both India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans, the site of the world’s largest mangroves, is known for its immense biodiversity and, of course, the Royal Bengal Tiger ( Panthera tigris ).
The bookcases lining the walls of his room are packed with hundreds of titles on every conceivable subject about the Sundarbans – flora, fauna, daily life, maps, atlases, and children’s books in English and Bengali. This is where he researches and plans issues of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha , a quarterly publication about the Sundarbans that he started after Cyclone Aila left a trail of devastation in the region in 2009.
“I made repeated trips to see the condition of the area. It was frightening,’’ he recalls. “Children were out of school, people had lost their homes, masses of men had migrated, and everything was left to the women to take care of. The people’s fate entirely depended on whether the river embankments would stay in place or collapse.”
Lahiri found media reports on the disaster sparse and superficial. “The media recycles stereotypes about the Sundarbans. Typically, you will find accounts of tiger attacks or rain. When it isn’t raining or flooded, the Sundarbans is rarely in the news,” he says. “Disaster, wildlife and tourism – that is the sum of what interests the media.”
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
Lahiri holds the first map of the Sundarbans (left) prepared by Major James Rennel in 1778. In his collection (right) are many books on the region
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
Lahiri has been collecting news (left) about the Sundarbans for many years. ‘When it isn’t raining or flooded, the Sundarbans is rarely in the news,’ he says. He holds up issues of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha (right), a magazine he founded in 2010 to counter this and provide local Indian and Bangladeshi perspectives on the region
He founded Sudhu Sundarban Charcha (loosely translated as ‘Just Sundarbans Discussions’) to comprehensively cover the region from both Indian and Bangladeshi perspectives. Since 2010, he has published 49 issues of the magazine and the 50th issue is slated to be published in November 2023. “Past issues have focused on everything, from how paan is grown, to maps of the Sundarbans, the lives of girl children, profiles of individual villages, piracy and rainfall,” he says. One issue even discussed how media covers the Sundarbans, featuring perspectives from journalists in West Bengal and Bangladesh.
The magazine’s last issue published in April 2023 – its 49th – is dedicated to mangroves and tigers. “Sundarbans are possibly the only mangroves in the world where tigers live. Therefore, we planned an issue around this.” he says. Planning has also begun on the 50th issue, which will focus on the work of a retired university professor who has extensively researched how climate change and rising sea levels impact the Sundarbans.
“Our readers are usually students and university researchers seeking specific data or information, and individuals genuinely interested in the region. We even have 80-year-old patrons who read our issues line by line,” says Lahiri.
Approximately 1,000 copies of the magazine are printed each quarter. “We have 520-530 regular subscribers, mostly in West Bengal. The magazine is couriered to them. Some 50 copies go to Bangladesh – we do not directly courier these copies as that becomes too expensive,” Lahiri explains. Instead, Bangladeshi booksellers purchase copies from Kolkata’s popular book market in College Street and carry them back to their country. “We also publish Bangladeshi writers and photographers,” he says.
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
Left: An issue of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha that focuses on women in the Sundarbans. Right: Forty nine issues have been published so far
PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar
Jyotirindra Narayan Lahiri with his wife Srijani Sadhukhan. She along with their two children, Ritaja and Archisman help in running the magazine
Bringing out the magazine is a costly exercise as every edition is typeset before being printed in black and white on glossy paper. “Then, there are ink, paper, and transport costs. However, our editorial costs are not high because we do everything ourselves,” says Lahiri, who is assisted by his wife Srijani Sadhukhan , 48, daughter Ritaja, 22, and son Archisman, 15. The editorial team consists of around 15-16 members who pitch in with their time and effort free of cost. “We do not have the means to employ people. Those who contribute their time and labour do so because they care about the issues we raise in the magazine,” he says.
A copy of the magazine is priced at Rs. 150. “If our own cost is 80 rupees, we must sell [each copy] at 150 rupees because we need to straightaway give [news] stand owners a 35 per cent commission,” says Lahiri, explaining the economics of publishing.
Nearly every day, Lahiri and his family monitor six Bengali and three English newspapers for news on the region. Since he is himself a recognised voice in the area, news – of tiger attacks, for example – often reaches him directly. Lahiri also collects letters written by readers to the editors of newspapers. “The readers may not be rich or powerful, but they know their subject and ask relevant questions,” he says.
The magazine is not his only responsibility. Every day, he travels 180 km to the adjoining Purba Bardhaman district to teach Geography to Classes V-XII students in a government school. “I leave home at 7 a.m. and return only at 8 p.m. The printing press is in Bardhaman city, so if there is work to be done there, I stop by the press and return home late evening,” says Lahiri who has been teaching since the last 26 years. “Teaching is my passion, just like the magazine,” he says.
The fisherwomen of Sundarbans wandering into dangerous territory
“How do I describe my fear? My heart races in terror. My thoughts are always on when I will escape back to open spaces,” says 41-year-old crab hunter and fisherwoman Parul Haldar, about the cold fear she feels during the days that she searches for crabs to catch in the dense mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. During the crab-hunting season, she rows a boat up and down the rivulets and creeks through the mangrove forest, always in a state of high alert for lurking tigers.
Now directing her wooden boat down the Garal river, Parul, a resident of Luxbagan village, squints in the direction of the criss-cross net fence beyond which lies the Marichjhapi forest. It was in this forest, near her village in the Gosaba block of the South 24 Parganas district, that Parul’s husband, Ishar Ronojit Haldar, was killed by a tiger seven years ago.
She rests the oars on the edges of the boat in which she and her mother Lokhi Mondal, 56, are out on a scorching summer day. Like her daughter, Lokhi is a fisherwoman too.
Parul was only 13 years old when she married Ishar. Her marital family was poor, but they had never gone into the forest to fish or catch crabs. “I convinced him to come and brought him to the jungle,” she recalls. “Seventeen years later, he died in the jungle.”
Parul lapses into silence at the memory. Ishar was 45 when he died, leaving Parul to raise their four daughters.
Parul and Lokhi pull the heavy oars again, sweating. The women steer the boat a safe distance away from the mangrove forest, now closed for fishing. Fishing activities in the mangrove forest are closed for three months, from April to June, to allow regeneration of fish. When the fishing season is paused, Parul usually sells fish from her pond for a living.
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
Left: Parul Haldar recalls the death of her husband, Ishar Haldar. Right: A picture of Ishar Ronojit Haldar who was killed by a tiger in 2016
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
Left: A cross netted fence, beyond which lie the Marichjhapi forests in South 24 Parganas district. Right: Parul (background) learned fishing from her mother and Lokhi (yellow sari foreground) learned it from her father
“Many accidents are happening,” Parul says, referring to attacks by the Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans, the only mangrove forest in the world inhabited by tigers. “Too many people are entering the forest and accidents are increasing. This is another reason why forest authorities are not allowing us to enter the forest.”
Tiger-related deaths are not uncommon in the Sundarbans, especially during the fishing season. The government reported only 12 deaths in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve Between 2018 and January 2023, but actual numbers may be higher, with local residents reporting more instances of attacks.
According to the government’s Status of Tigers Report, the Sundarbans was home to 100 tigers in 2022 , compared to 88 in 2018.
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Parul has been fishing since she was 23 years old, having learnt how to fish from her mother.
Lokhi started fishing when she was only seven years old, accompanying her father to the forest. Her husband Santosh Mondal, 64 fought off a tiger in 2016 and managed to return home alive.
“He had a knife in his hand and fought the tiger. But after that incident, his courage broke, and he refused to go to the forest any more,” says Lokhi. She, however, did not stop. Once her husband stopped going, she began to make the journey into the forest with Parul and her son-in-law, Ishar, who later died.
“I don’t have the courage to go to the jungle with anyone else. Nor do I allow Parul to go alone. As long as I am alive, I will accompany her,” she says. “Only your own blood can protect you in the jungle.”
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
As the number of crabs decrease, Parul and Lokhi have to venture deeper into the mangrove forests to find them
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
Parul and Lokhi rowing across the River Garal
The two women row in tandem, without needing to converse. Once the crab hunting season starts, they will need to obtain passes from the forest department and rent a boat to take to the forest.
Parul pays Rs. 50 per day in rent. Usually, they are joined by a third woman. The three women must stay in the forest for at least 10 days. “We sleep and eat in the boat and cook our meals on it. We carry rice and dal, drinking water in drums and a small stove. We do not leave the boat under any circumstances, not even to go to the toilet,” Parul says. The rising incidence of tiger attacks, she says, are the main reason.
“Tigers now even climb on to the boats and take human beings away. My own husband was attacked in a boat.”
For the ten days that they are out fishing, the women live on the boats even in the rain. “The crabs are in one corner of the boat, the humans in another, and the cooking in a third corner,” Lokhi adds.
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
“We do not leave the boat under any circumstances, not even to go to the toilet,” says Parul
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
Lokhi Mondal demonstrating how to unfurl fishing nets to catch crabs
Like their male counterparts who frequent the jungles, women are also vulnerable to attacks by tigers while out fishing. However, there are no estimates of how many women have been killed in the Sundarbans, considered a hotspot for man-animal conflict.
“Most of the recorded deaths are of men. Women too are attacked by tigers but the data hasn’t been collected. Women go to the forests, of course, but in fewer numbers compared to men,” says Pradeep Chatterjee, convenor of the National Platform For Small-Scale Fish Workers. Proximity to the forest is an important factor. Women whose villages are located a good distance away from the forest tend not to go. They also undertake the journey only when enough other women are making the trip too.
In Parul and Lokhi’s village of Luxbagan, whose population was 4,504 according to the Census 2011 including approximately 48 percent women, nearly every household has women who go to the Marichjhapi forest, just 5 km from the village.
The good prices that crabs fetch are also a major draw for this high-risk work. “Selling fish doesn’t earn me much. Crabs fetch the main income. I can earn anything between Rs. 300-500 daily when I go to the forest,” Parul says. The bigger crabs fetch Rs. 400-600 a kg while the smaller ones go for Rs. 60-80 per kg. The combined catch of three women on a trip can be anything between 20-40 kg.
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Apart from the risk posed by tigers, the other big challenge faced by crab-catchers in the Sunderbans is the dwindling catch. “More people are coming to the jungle to catch crabs. Earlier crabs would be in plenty, now we have to work harder to find them,” says Parul.
As the number of crabs shrink, fisherwomen are forced to go deeper into the forests where the risk of being attacked by a tiger increases.
Chatterjee said the fisher-people of the region have begun to venture deep into the mangrove forests to find an adequate quantity of fish or crabs and there they are coming into confrontations with tigers. “Forest authorities only focus on tiger conservation. But if the fish don’t survive, tigers won’t survive either,” Chatterjee says. “Human-wildlife conflict can reduce if the fish in the rivers increases.”
After returning from the river, Parul busies herself in making lunch. She cooks fish that she has caught from her pond, boils the rice and stirs sugar into a mango chutney.
She doesn’t like eating crabs, she says. Her mother Lokhi joins the conversation. “Neither me nor my daughter eat crabs,” she says. Asked why, she doesn’t provide details, but mentions “accidents”, a reference to her son-in-law Ishar’s death.
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR
Parul at home in her village Luxbagan, South 24 Parganas. None of her daughters work in the forest
None of Parul’s four daughters, Pushpita, Paromita, Papiya, and Papri, works in the forest. Pushpita and Papiya work at people’s houses in other districts of West Bengal while Paromita works for a private company in Bengaluru. The youngest, Papri, 13, stays in a hostel near Luxbagan but is sickly. “Papri had typhoid and malaria, so I had to spend Rs. 13,000 on her treatment. I also pay for her hostel fees of Rs. 2,000 each month,” Parul says.
Parul herself is unwell. She has chest pains and cannot go fishing or crab hunting this year. She now lives with her daughter Paromita Mistry, in Bengaluru.
“A doctor in Kolkata asked me to do MRI scans that cost Rs. 40,000. I do not have so much money,” she says. She decided to travel to the southern city and live with her daughter and son-in-law, who both work for private companies. Parul also consulted a doctor in Bengaluru, who prescribed rest and medicines for six months.
“I think the pains in my chest started due to the fear I constantly feel, especially when I go to the forest. My husband was killed by a tiger, and my father too was attacked. That is what caused the chest pains,” she says.
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 10 March 2022
All of 22 and already worn down by health problems for over three to four years, as Meenu Sardar stepped out to fetch water that summer morning in 2021, nothing could have warned her that the worst was about to come. The stepway leading to the pond in Dayapur village was broken in places. Meenu slipped and tumbled down the stairs, falling face down.
“I had excruciating pain in my chest and stomach,” she recounts in Bengali . “I started bleeding from the vagina. When I went to the bathroom, something slipped out of me and fell to the floor. I noticed a flesh-like substance coming out of me. I tried to pull it out, but I couldn’t extract the whole thing.”
A visit to a private clinic in a nearby village confirmed the miscarriage. Meenu, tall, thin, and wearing a smile despite her worries, had irregular menstrual cycles since then, along with acute physical pain and emotional distress.
Her village in the Gosaba block of West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district has a population of about 5,000. Lush with sprawling paddy fields and the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, it is among only a handful of interior villages in Gosaba that are connected by road.
Meenu was bleeding without a break for more than a month after the fall, and that was not the end of her suffering. “Sharirik somporke eto byatha kore [sexual intercourse is so painful],” she says. “It feels as if I am being torn apart. When I have to pass stools and exert pressure, or when I lift heavy objects, I can feel my uterus coming down.”
Meenu Sardar was bleeding for over a month after a miscarriage. Photo: Ritayan Mukherjee
Circumstances and conditioning deepened her misery. On suffering vaginal bleeding after the fall, Meenu, who did not study beyond Class 10, decided not to consult the ASHA worker (Accredited Social Health Activist) in Dayapur. “I didn’t want her to know,” she says, “because others in my village might have come to know about my miscarriage. Also, I don’t think she would have known what to do.”
She and her husband, Bappa Sardar, had not been planning a baby, but she was not using any contraception at the time. “I didn’t know about family planning methods when I got married. Nobody told me. I learnt about them only after I miscarried.”
Meenu is aware of the sole woman gynaecologist posted at the Gosaba Rural Hospital, about 12 kilometres from Dayapur, but she was never available. There are two Rural Medical Practitioners (RMPs), unlicensed healthcare providers, in her village.
Dayapur’s RMPs are both men.
“I was not comfortable disclosing my problem to a man. Also, they don’t have expertise,” she says.
Meenu and Bappa visited several private doctors in the district, and one in Kolkata too, spending more than Rs. 10,000, but with little luck. The couple’s only source of income is Bappa’s salary of Rs. 5,000 from a small grocery store where he works. He borrowed from friends to pay for the medical consultations.
A course of pills from a homeopath in Dayapur restored her menstrual cycle eventually. She says he was the only male doctor she felt comfortable discussing her miscarriage with. An abdominal ultrasound that he advised to diagnose her continuing vaginal discharge and acute discomfort will have to wait until Meenu has saved enough money.
Until then, she cannot lift heavy objects, and has to frequently rest.
Meenu’s circuitous route to access healthcare is a common narrative among women in villages of the region. A 2016 study on health system actors in the Indian Sundarbans says residents here lack choices in healthcare. Publicly funded facilities are “either non-existent or non-functional”, and the functional facilities may be physically inaccessible due to the terrain. Filling this gap is an army of informal healthcare providers, “the only resort in normal times as during climatic crisis,” notes the study, which examines the social network of RMPs.
*****
This was not Meenu’s first nagging health problem. In 2018, she suffered from an itchy rash all over her body. As angry red boils covered her arms, legs, chest and face, Meenu could feel her arms and legs swelling. The heat worsened the itching. The family spent nearly Rs. 20,000 on doctor consultations and medicines.
“For more than a year, this was my life – just going to hospitals,” she says. Recovery was slow, leaving her with a persistent fear that the skin ordeal may return.
The high salinity of water is one of the major causes of gynaecological problems in these low-lying islands in the Bay of Bengal. Photo: Ritayan Mukherjee
Less than 10 kilometres from where Meenu lives, 51-year-old Alapi Mondal in Rajat Jubilee village recounts a strikingly similar story. “Three or four years ago, I suffered intense itching all over my skin, sometimes so severe that there would be pus oozing out. I know many other women who suffered the same problem. At one point, every family in our village and the adjoining villages had someone whose skin was infected. The doctor told me it was some kind of a virus.”
Alapi, who is a fisherwoman, is better now, having been on medication for nearly a year. She was able to consult doctors at a charitable private clinic in Sonarpur block at only Rs. 2 per visit, but the medicines were expensive. Her family spent Rs. 13,000 on her treatment. Visiting the clinic involved a journey of 4-5 hours. Her own village has a small government-run clinic, but she didn’t know about its existence then.
“After my skin problems worsened, I stopped going to fish,” she says. Earlier, she used to wade off the riverbank, often neck-deep in water for hours, dragging her net behind her for tiger prawn seedlings. She never resumed working.
Several women in Rajat Jubilee have experienced skin conditions, for which they blame the highly saline water of the Sundarbans.
In an essay on the impact of the water quality on local livelihood, in the book Pond Ecosystems of the Indian Sundarbans , author Sourav Das writes that women suffer skin diseases from using saline pond water for cooking, bathing and washing. Prawn seed farmers spend 4-6 hours a day in saline river water. “They also suffer from reproductive tract infection by the use of saline water,” he notes.
Research has shown that the abnormally high salinity of water in the Sundarbans is on account of rising sea levels, cyclones and storm surges – all portents of climate change – in addition to shrimp farming and reduced mangrove cover. Salt water contamination of all water resources, including drinking water, is typical to the large river deltas in Asia.
“In the Sundarbans, the high salinity of water is one of the major causes of gynaecological problems, especially a high rate of pelvic inflammatory disease,” says Dr. Shyamol Chakraborty, who practises at Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital and has conducted medical camps across the Sundarbans. “But salt water is not the only reason. Socio-economic status, ecology, the use of plastic, hygiene, nutrition and healthcare delivery systems all play an important role.”
According to Dr. Jaya Shreedhar, senior health media advisor to Internews, an international media support organisation, women in this region are exposed to saline water for 4-7 hours a day, particularly the shrimp farmers. They are vulnerable to a host of afflictions including dysentery, diarrhoea, skin diseases, cardiovascular diseases, abdominal pain and gastric ulcers. Saline water may lead to hypertension, especially in women, affecting pregnancies, and sometimes causing miscarriages.
High levels of salt content in the Sundarbans water makes the women susceptible to skin diseases. Photo: Urvashi Sarkar
Among people in the 15-59 age group in the Sundarbans, women have a disproportionately higher burden of ailments than the men, observed a study in 2010.
Anwarul Alam, coordinator of a mobile medical unit run by Southern Health Improvement Samity, an NGO in South 24 Parganas providing medical services in remote areas, says their travelling medical unit receives 400-450 patients a week in the Sundarbans. About 60 per cent are women, many with skin complaints, leucorrhoea (vaginal discharge), anaemia and amenorrhoea (absence of or irregular menstruation).
Alam says the women patients are malnourished. “Most fruits and vegetables are brought by boat to the islands and not locally grown. Not everybody can afford them. The increasing heat during summers and shortage of fresh water is also a major cause of ailments,” he says.
Meenu and Alapi eat rice, dal , potatoes and fish on most days. They eat few fruits and vegetables as they do not grow them. Like Meenu, Alapi too has multiple maladies.
About five years ago, Alapi experienced excessive bleeding. “I had to undergo three surgeries to get my jarayu [uterus] removed after a sonography revealed a tumour. My family must have spent more than 50,000 rupees,” she says. The first surgery was to remove an appendix, and the other two were for a hysterectomy.
It was a long journey to the private hospital, located in Sonakhali village of the neighbouring Basanti block, where Alapi’s hysterectomy was performed. She had to take a boat from Rajat Jubilee to the ferry ghat in Gosaba, another boat to the ferry ghat in Gadhkhali village, and from there a bus or shared van to Sonakhali – the entire journey took 2-3 hours one way.
Alapi, who has a son and a daughter, knows at least four or five other women in Rajat Jubilee who underwent total hysterectomies.
One of them is Basanti Mondal, a 40-year-old fisherwoman. “The doctors told me my uterus had a tumour. Earlier, I had a lot of energy to go fishing. I could work very hard,” says the mother of three. “But I don’t feel as energetic after my uterus was removed.” She paid Rs. 40,000 for the surgery at a private hospital.
The National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-16) noted that 2.1 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 years in rural West Bengal had undergone hysterectomies – marginally higher than the urban West Bengal rate of 1.9 per cent. (The all-India rate was 3.2 per cent.)
In an article published in the Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika in September last year, journalist Swati Bhattacharjee writes that in the Sudarbans, women as young as 26-36 years have undergone the surgery to remove their uterus after complaining of vaginal infection, excessive or irregular bleeding, painful sexual intercourse or pelvic inflammation.
Unqualified medical practitioners scare these women of having uterine tumours and subsequently into undergoing a hysterectomy at a private hospital. According to Bhattacharjee, profiteering private clinics take advantage of the state government’s Swasthya Sathi insurance scheme that provides a cover of up to Rs. 5 lakh annually for beneficiary families.
For Meenu, Alapi, Basanti and millions of other women in the Sundarbans, sexual and reproductive health problems are compounded by the difficulties in accessing healthcare.
Basanti travelled five hours from her home in Gosaba block for her hysterectomy. “Why can’t the government have more hospitals and nursing homes? Or even more gynaecologists?” she asks. “Even if we are poor, we don’t want to die.”
The names of Meenu and Bappa Sardar, and their location, have been changed to protect their privacy.
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 10 September, 2019
South 24 Parganas, West Bengal: Kajal Lata Biswas is still haunted by memories of the cyclone. Though it’s been 10 years since Aila hit the Sundarbans, she still clearly recalls May 25, 2009.
It was just before noon. “The [Kalindi] river water rushed into the village and flooded all the houses,” says Kajal Lata. She was at a relative’s house in Kumirmari village that day, around seven kilometres from her own village, Gobindakati. “Some 40-50 of us took shelter in a boat where we stayed the whole day and night. We watched trees, boats, cattle and paddy being swept away. At night, we could not see a thing. Even the matchsticks were soaked. We could see only when lightning flashed across the sky.”
Sitting outside her house and cleaning fish for lunch, 48-year-old Kajal Lata, a farmer, continues, “That night can never be forgotten. There wasn’t a drop of drinking water. Somehow, I collected a few raindrops in a plastic bag, which I used to wet the lips of my two daughters and niece, who were very thirsty.” Her voice shakes with the memory.
The next morning, they used a boat to to reach their village. Then waded through flood water to reach home. “Tanushree, my elder daughter, then 17, almost drowned where the water was very high. Luckily, she grabbed her aunt’s saree pallu which had come loose,” Kajal Lata says, her eyes relaying the fear she felt.
In May 2019, her fear returned with cyclone Fani, its arrival coinciding with the wedding of her younger daughter, 25-year-old Anushree.
Kajal Lata Biswas, cleaning fish outside her house in Gobindakati village, recalls the terror of approaching cyclones; paddy is stored in these huts in her village, and the crop has taken a hit
The wedding was fixed for May 6. Loudspeaker announcements about Fani by the panchayat and on radio by the government had started a few days earlier. “Imagine our plight and fear,” Kajal Lata says. “We were terrified that winds and rain would destroy all the preparations. There was some rain in the days before the wedding. But thankfully, the cyclone did not affect our village,” she adds, clearly relieved.
On May 2, the India Meteorological Department had issued a warning about Fani hitting Andhra Pradesh, Odisha (which turned out to be the worst affected) and West Bengal. Talking about Fani, Prafulla Mondal, an 80-year-old farmer and former teacher in Rajat Jubilee village, raises his voice a few notches: “Fani missed the Sundarbans very narrowly. The winds whistled by us. If it had hit our village, we would have been destroyed, along with our houses and land…”
As both Mondal and Kajal Lata know only too well, cyclones are common in the Sundarbans. The Disaster Management and Civil Defence Department of the West Bengal government categorises both South and 24 North Parganas districts as ‘very high damage risk zones’ due to cyclones.
Mondal’s village is in Gosaba block of South 24 Parganas district, and Kajal Lata’s village is in North 24 Parganas district’s Hingalganj block. Both are among the 19 blocks which comprise the Indian Sundarbans in West Bengal – 6 blocks in North 24 Parganas and 13 in South 24 Parganas.
Spread across India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans is a vast delta with perhaps the largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world – covering around 10,200 square kilometres. “The Sundarbans region is one of the richest ecosystems in the world…” says a 2014 report by the World Bank titled Building Resilience for the Sustainable Development of the Sundarbans. “The entire mangrove forest region is known for its exceptional biodiversity, including numerous threatened species such as the Royal Bengal tiger, estuarine crocodile, Indian python, and several species of river dolphin. It is home to more than 10 per cent of mammal and 25 percent of bird species found in India.”
The Indian Sundarbans – roughly 4,200 square kilometres – is also home to nearly 4.5 million people, many of whom live on the edge, struggling with meagre livelihoods, a harsh terrain and weather extremes.
Though the region has not seen a major cyclone after Aila, it remains severely vulnerable. A 2006 report by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, done for the West Bengal government’s Department of Disaster Management, notes that the state experienced 71 cyclonic storms from the years 1891 to 2004. In that period, South 24 Pargana district’s Gosaba was the most affected block, with six severe cyclones and 19 cyclones.
n Rajat Jubilee village, 80-year-old Prafulla Mondal has weathered many storms, but his family is now struggling with erratic weather changes
Prafulla can thus recall cyclones even before Aila. “I cannot forget the 1998 cyclone [described as West Bengal’s ‘most intense storm’ since Independence, stronger even than Aila, which was a ‘severe cyclonic storm’] with its strong and violent winds. Before that too, I can remember the cyclone of 1988,” he says.
But even given this stormy past, cyclonic depressions (a tropical weather disturbance at sea, in the range of 31- 60 kilometres an hour, below the range of a cyclonic storm of 62-82 kilometres) have increased 2.5 times in the last 10 years in the lower Gangetic delta (where the Sundarbans are located), notes Dr. Abhijit Mitra, a Kolkata-based oceanographer, in a 2019 book titled Mangrove Forests in India. Exploring Ecosystem Services. “This means that cyclones occur more frequently,” he says.
Various other studies show that the incidence of cyclones has increased in the Bay of Bengal, alongside the Sundarbans. One study published in 2015 in the Diversity journal puts the increase at 26 per cent between 1881 and 2001. And using available data from 1877 to 2005 on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal during May, October and November, a 2007 study shows that the frequency of severe cyclonic storms here has registered significant increasing trends in past 129 years during these intense cyclonic months
In part, this is attributed to the increase in sea surface temperature (notes, among others, a paper in the Journal of Earth Science & Climate Change). These temperatures rose in the Indian Sundarbans at 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade from 1980 through 2007 – higher than the globally observed warming rate of 0.06° C per decade.
There have been several catastrophic fallouts. “While the Sundarbans last experienced a major cyclone in 2009,” says Prof. Sugata Hazra of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, “the region has suffered because of repeated inundation and embankment failure owing to subsequent cyclones in the northern Bay of Bengal.”
Rising sea levels and sea surface temperatures, among several other shifts, are threatening the Sundarbans
Embankments, the World Bank report notes, “play a key role in the Sundarbans as systems of defense against cyclonic storms and sea level rise. The people and the productivity of their holdings are under increased threat from deltaic subsidence, sea level rise, and increased cyclone intensity as climate change and the decay of a 19th century 3,500-kilometer system of embankments take their toll…”
A 2011 World Wildlife Fund paper says that the relative mean sea level for 2002-2009 measured at the Sagar island observatory, Sundarbans, rose at the rate of 12 mm per year or at the rate of 8 mm per year for 25 years.
The warming and related sea level rise is also adverse affecting mangroves. These forests help protect coastal areas from cyclones and erosion, act as breeding ground for fish and other species, and are also the habitat of the Bengal Tiger. A 2010 paper by Jadavpur University’s School of Oceanographic Studies, titled Temporal Change Detection (2001-2008) Study of Sundarban notes that the rise in sea level and cyclones seriously affect the health of Sundarban’s mangrove forests by reducing the forest cover.
Arjun Mondal a fisherman from Rajat Jubilee village, was acutely aware of the importance of mangroves to the Sundarbans. He worked with an NGO, the Sundarbans Rural Development Society. “Everyone has heard of climate change, but how is it affecting us? We need to know more about this,” he told me in May 2019.
On June 29, 2019, Arjun was carried away by a tiger while hunting for crabs in the Pirkhali forest. While humans have for long been attacked by tigers in the Sundarbans, the increasing reports of attacks are at least partially due to the erosion of forest land caused by rising sea levels, bringing tigers in closer contact with inhabited villages.
With the battering of the region by cyclones, water salinity levels have also risen, especially in the central Sundarbans, where Gosaba is located. “…the ecosystem is being adversely impacted by significant increases in salinity due, in part, to sea level rise as well as reductions in freshwater flows to the delta,” notes the World Bank report.
The extensive embankments in the Sundarbans, crucial to farming and controlling soil salinity, are steadily being eroded by the rising sea levels
A research paper co-authored by Dr. Mitra describes the Sundarbans as ‘hypersaline’. “Water salinity has increased due to rising sea levels in the central part of Sundarbans. This is clearly linked to climate change,” says Dr Mitra.
Other researchers have noted that the siltation of the Bidyadhari river, which prevents fresh water flows from the Himalayas to the central and eastern Sundarbans. Researchers have attributed the siltation in part to land reclamation, cultivation, dumping of sewage sludge and fisheries waste. The building of the Farakka Barrage in 1975 (on the Ganga, in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district) also contributed to the increasing salinity of the central Sundarbans.
The Mondal family in Rajat Jubilee knows the effects of the high salinity – they had no rice to sell for three years after Aila. Their annual income of Rs. 10, 000- 12,000 from selling rice was wiped out. “With rice cultivation gone, entire villages emptied out as men left to hunt for work, to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat and Maharashtra, where they joined factories or construction sites as labourers,” Prafulla recalls.
Across the state, Aila affected more than 2 lakh hectares of cropped area and over 6 million people, and it killed 137 and destroyed over 1 million houses . “There was nobody in my village who did not suffer losses,” Prafulla says. “My house and crops were destroyed. I lost 14 goats and could not cultivate paddy for three years. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. Those were hard years. I took up carpentry and odd jobs to make a living.”
After Aila intensified salinity, Kajal Lata’s family too had to sell six bighas of their 23 bighas (7.6 acres) of land. “Not a blade of grass grew for two years because the soil was so salty. Not even rice could grow. Slowly, vegetables like mustard, cabbage, cauliflower and gourds are growing again, enough for our consumption, but not enough to sell,” she says. “We also had a pond which produced different fish like shol, magur, rui and we could earn Rs. 25,000-30,000 a year by selling these. But after Aila, the water became entirely salty, so there is barely any fish.”
Mangroves are critical to the ecosystem of the Sundarbans, but they too are slowly thinning out
The soil degradation – including high salinity and high alkalinity – caused by Aila resulted in poor paddy growth across much of North and South 24 Pargana, notes a 2016 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences. A study in the journal shows that to grow paddy again, phosphate and potash-based fertiliser had to be used above the recommended levels.
“After Aila, fertiliser use has increased. Only then we are able to get the required yield,” says Prabir Mondal, Prafulla’s 48-year-old son. “It isn’t healthy to eat, but we still need to eat it. I remember the rice we ate as children. You could eat it as it is. Now, even when eaten with vegetables, something feels amiss.”
His father owns 13 bighas (4.29 acres) of land which produces 8-9 bastas of rice per bigha – one basta equals 60 kilos. “The cost of planting, cutting and lifting the rice plus fertiliser costs means that we earn very little over what we have spent,” says Prabir.
Paddy production across the Sundarbans, a 2018 research article observes, fell by half after Aila – from 64-80 quintal to 32-40 quintals per 1.6 hectares. Though paddy production has now stabilised to pre-Aila levels, says Prabir, his family and others in his village remain completely dependent on rainfall from June to September.
And that rainfall has become unreliable. “The accelerated sea level rise,” says Prof. Hazra, “and the delayed arrival and deficiency of monsoon, are impacts of climate change in the long run.”
High rainfall exceeding 100 millimetres a day is occurring more often in the last two decades over the northern Bay of Bengal (where the Sundarbans is located), says ongoing research at the School of Oceanographic Studies, Kolkata. At the same time, in the sowing season, Prof. Hazra says, the monsoon has often fallen short, as it did this year – till September 4, around 307 millimetres short in South 24 Parganas and nearly 157 mm less in North 24 Parganas.
It’s not just this year – a shortfall or excess rain has been recurring in the Sundarbans for some years. The normal June to September monsoon rain in South 24 Parganas is 1552.6 mm. The monsoon data for 2012-2017 the district indicates that rainfall was deficient in four out of six years, with major lows in 2017 (1173.3 mm) and 2012 (1130.4 mm).
In the North 24 Parganas, the opposite has happened: excess rainfall. The normal June to September rainfall here is 1172.8 mm. The monsoon data for 2012-2017 shows that rainfall was excess in four out of these six years with the highest in 2015 – 1428 mm.
“The real trouble is the untimely rain,” says Kajal Lata. “In February this year, there was plenty of rain, almost like monsoon. Even the elders said they could not recall a time when it rained so much in February.” Her family depends on paddy for an income, sown in June-July and harvested in November-December. “The paddy growth depends entirely on rainfall. If there is no rain, the rice will not grow.”
Since the last four or five years, she says, it’s been raining in her village in November-December, in addition to the monsoon months. While some showers during these months usually occur here, their intensity can harm the paddy harvest. “Either there is no rain when required or it rains excessively out of season. This is destroying the harvest. Every year we think this time there won’t be excessive [unseasonal] rain. But it rains so much and the crop is completely destroyed. That is why we have the saying, ‘Aashay morey chaasa’ [‘Hope kills the farmer’].”
In Rajat Jubilee village, Prabir Mondal is also worried. “Through June and July, there was no rainfall [in my village]. Some paddy leaves dried up. Thankfully, rain has arrived [in August]. But will it be enough? What if it rains too much and the crop drowns?”
As a healthcare practitioner (he has a BA degree in alternative medicine), Prabir says his patients also increasingly complain of the heat.“Many now suffer from heat stroke. It can hit at any time and can be fatal,” he explains.
Land temperatures in the Sundarbans are also increasing, besides the rising sea surface temperatures. From 180 days in a year when the temperature was 32 degrees Celsius or higher here in 1960, the number of such days increased to 188 in 2017, show data on an interactive portal of the New York Times on climate and global warming. This could become 213 to 258 days by the end of the century.
Buffeted repeatedly by the growing heat, cyclones, erratic rain, salinity, vanishing mangroves and more, the residents of the Sundarbans live in a near-constant state of uncertainty. Prafulla Mondal, witness of several storms and cyclones, wonders: “Who knows what will come next?”
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 28 December, 2018
“Do you think, there will be a place to sit inside the train today?” yells Breshpati Sardar, standing on a crowded platform at Jadavpur railway station in south Kolkata. The women waiting next to her shake their heads in disappointment and laugh at the question.
Breshpati is waiting for the 4:35 p.m. train to Canning. The train rushes into Jadavpur station. The women brace themselves in the crowd, pushing to enter one of the two already-full ladies compartments.
The train has come from Sealdah station in north Kolkata, stopping at Park Circus, Ballygunge Junction and Dhakuria. After Jadavpur, it will halt at Bagha Jatin, New Garia and Garia – all predominantly middle class and affluent areas of South Kolkata. The women waiting at Jadavpur – as well as at the other stations along the route – work as domestic helpers in these south Kolkata localities.
Many of them take the 45-kilometres Sealdah-Canning route, which covers 16 stations, and the 65-kilometres Sealdah-Lakshmikantapur train that halts at 25 stations, or the Sealdah-Namkhana line, which goes even further south. So some in Kolkata call these Eastern Railways trains the ‘jhi special’. Jhi is a disparaging term in Bengali for female domestic workers.
Photo: Urvashi SarkarPhoto: Urvashi Sarkar On the Sealdah-Canning train: some in Kolkata call these Eastern Railways trains the ‘jhi special’ – ‘jhi‘ is a disparaging term in Bengali for female domestic workers
That afternoon, on her way back home from work, wearing an orange saree, a red bindi and clutching a white handbag, Breshpati pushes her way into the compartment. Inside, amid the crush of bodies, bags and bangles, she finds a narrow space, just enough to stand. And repeatedly looks at the nearest window seat. When the person sitting there gets up to leave, Breshpati dives in to capture the coveted seat. Another woman, who has been pushed aside, screams at her.
A fight erupts. Breshpati’s voice rises and she turns red with anger. Other women quickly intervene. She calms down and settles down on another woman’s lap. The smile returns to her face and she excitedly shows a video of a snake consuming a rabbit to the women near her. “I usually never get into fights. But didn’t you see how the woman was behaving?” she says, angrily.
Some 75 minutes later, the train pulls into Canning, around 45 kilometres from Jadavpur, where Breshpati boarded the train. Canning is on the outer edges of the Sundarbans region in South 24 Parganas district. A lack of work options near their homes forces the women to commute to the city every day.
Breshpati’s house is a 30-minute walk from the station, near the market. On the way, she tells me, “Earlier I lived with my parents and went to school. But after Class 5, it became difficult for them to make ends meet.” Breshpati has three sisters and a brother. She started working in people’s houses when she was 11, and has continued ever since. She was married at the age of 14, and is now 28.
Photo: Siddharth AdelkarPhoto: Siddharth Adelkar. Breshpati Sardar takes the 4:30 a.m. train from Canning to Jadavpur in south Kolkata, and the 4:35 p.m. train back to her two-room tin home (left); her daughters Sanya and Tanya (right) and a son live with her parents and in-laws because the work schedules of Breshpati and her husband allow them almost no time at home
Breshpati’s daughters, Tanya, 11 and Sanya, 10, are waiting for her when we reach their two-room tin house around 6 p.m. She also has a six-year-old son, Biswajit. The children live with her parents and in-laws. The work schedules of Breshpati and her husband, Sanjib Sardar, leave them with little spare time. Sanijb works in a farsan-making unit and earns Rs. 9,000 a month.
That evening, their daughters are visiting. Breshpati instructs them to buy oil and vegetables, lights up the gobar gas furnace for cooking and fetches water from a nearby tubewell. Sanjib too will be home soon. After feeding the family and herself, and cleaning the utensils, Breshpati will sleep for a few hours and wake up at 3 a.m. to be able to reach Canning station in time for the 4:30 a.m. train to Jadavpur. “It is dark and sometimes cold. But I do not feel scared because many of us from my neighbourhood work at people’s homes in Kolkata and travel together. We call out to each other as we pass each other’s houses,” she says.
Breshpati’s day then covers work in six households. “My tasks include cooking, washing clothes and utensils, and cleaning. I get Rs. 8,500 a month in all. I usually get tea and food at my employers’ houses and 3-4 holidays a month. But not all employers are good. Once, an employer cut 20 days salary because I did not come to work for a few days. I stopped going there.”
Though Breshpati claims to be largely treated well by her employers, domestic workers usually labour in difficult conditions. A lack of decent wages, an absence of defined hours and benefit, abuse and sexual harassment are some of the issues they regularly face, says a 2016 memorandum submitted to the West Bengal government by the Griho Shramik Adhikar Abhiyan, a collective of organisations and unions of domestic workers.
‘If the women ask for more wages, they can lose their jobs, since others are willing to work at lesser rates. They are sometimes given stale food…’
Watch video: Riding the dawn train, doing the domestic work grind
The memorandum also lists victimisation by traffickers and placement agencies, forced migration, a lack of welfare measures and of skill development avenues. It notes that domestic workers are recognised under the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act (2008) and the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013. But their working conditions were yet to be regulated by the West Bengal government.
The central government has formulated a draft national policy for domestic workers with recommendations on social security and minimum wages. But its implementation has been left to the states.
In June 2018, a domestic workers’ organisation, Paschim Banga Griha Paricharika Samity was granted trade union status for the first time in West Bengal. Soon after, the organisation presented its demands to the state government, including Rs. 54 as the hourly wage, maternal leave, four days paid leave each month and the right to use the toilet at the workplace.
“If the women ask for more wages, they can lose their jobs, since others are willing to work at lesser rates,” says Mallika Das, who works with Parichiti, a Kolkata-based non-governmental organisation that works with domestic workers. “There is no creche at the workplace, so they are forced to leave their children with others. They are sometimes given stale food to eat. Some employers do not even allow them use their toilets. The toilets in the railway station are mostly locked, broken or in such a bad condition that the women have to hold themselves until they reach home in the evening.”
Photo: Siddharth AdelkarPhoto: Siddharth Adelkar. Breshpati Sardar at the Canning railway station in the morning, and on the train heading to work before daylight
Breshpati’s employers permit her to use their toilets. “I knead their chapatis and cut and chop vegetables with my own hands. Why should they object?” Her biggest discomfort is having to stand all day in the houses she works at and in the train while returning. “My legs and back constantly ache,” she admits.
The night passes and Canning station begins to stir around 4 a.m. We see Breshpati on the platform, a cup of tea and biscuits in hand. At that early hour, she appears fresh with her hair tied in a bun, the bindi in place and her face shining. Other women arrive, all going to work, including her friend Basanti Sardar, who works at Jadavpur too. “Come rain or shine, we maids must go and work, else our employers will be angry. They can’t do without us!” says Basanti. The women laugh.
Photo: Siddharth Adelkar. After alighting at Jadavpur (above) and other stations, the women walk off to work
“Our lives are tough and we are poor. But these are the moments of laughter that we live for,” says Breshpati. At that early hour, the train is empty, but it will rapidly fill as it heads into Kolkata. Breshpati and Basanti sit in the general compartment instead of the ladies compartment. “In the general compartment, men sometimes offer their seats and will not scream at us. When possible, we board this compartment,” Basanti says.
The train leaves at 4:30 a.m. and reached Jadavpur after roughly 75 minutes. Breshpati hurries away, walking, to her workplace, amid the crowds of other domestic workers making their way outside the station.
Many workers also travel from Lakshmikantapur town in South 24 Parganas district, to Sealdah. The train journey of over 60 kilometres takes around 85 minutes. Chameli Baidya boards from Mathurapur Road station, the third stop on the line. She works at six households in the Ballygunge neighbourhood in south Kolkata. Ten years ago, she had a different life.
“My husband and I owned a paan-beedi shop,” she recalls. “Things were fine for some time, then my husband stopped working and began wasting money. We had to close the shop and I started working at people’s houses. When I ran the shop, I was independent. Now, working at people’s places, I get scolded if I am late or if I miss even a day’s work.” Chameli is now unable to even pay her house rent, and she and her husband, along with their three daughters and a son, live in a shanty near the Mathurapur railway line.
Chameli says the train journey is more difficult than working in houses. “I suffer each morning during the journey. Everyone pushes and screams. Sometimes, people even start hitting each other. There is no place to sit. If I had a handful of rice to put in my children’s mouths, I would not make this journey. I would stay at home.”
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 20 July, 2018
“I remember the storm arriving and heavy rain pounding away at my house. Then the house crumbled before my eyes and the [Muri Ganga] river washed it away,” says Purnima Bhuyan. She is recalling one of the many times her home in Khasimara was destroyed.
Now more than 70 years old, Bhuyan no longer lives in Khasimara village on the tiny Ghoramara island in Sagar block of South 24 Parganas district. In 1993, hers was one of the 13 families from Ghoramara granted a small piece of land by the West Bengal government in Gangasagar village on Sagar island, a 45-minute boat ride away.
Since the mid-1970s, Ghoramara’s land mass has shrunk by nearly half – from 8.51 square kilometres in 1975 to 4.43 square kilometres in 2012, says a 2014 paper in the journal International Perspectives on Climate Change. The causes for this are many – river and coastal erosion in the Sundarbans region where the island is located, flooding, cyclones, the loss of mangroves, the rise in sea levels. While the total number of people on Ghoramara displaced by these processes is unclear, some islanders believe that, in various batches, around 4,000 have been forced to move to Sagar or to mainland areas like Kakdwip and Namkhana.
Bhuyan clearly remembers that day when her house collapsed, though she cannot recall which year it was. “I was washing vessels in my neighbour’s pond from where I could see my home. My husband was sick with typhoid. My neighbour, whose house was bigger than ours, asked me to bring him and our children there,” she says. “It had started raining, high tide had set in and the river had reached the land on which our house was built. Our house withstood the rains for a long time, but then a storm came in from the east bringing even more rain. Soon, the house [broke down and] vanished. I’ve lost my house to the river 10-12 times.”
Photo: Siddharth AdelkarPhoto: Siddharth Adelkar. Purnima Bhuyan (left) shifted to Sagar island in 1993 after her home was destroyed 10-12 times, and Montu Mondal (right) moved after losing his house twice
During the years that Purnima’s home was repeatedly washed away by the river (she cannot recall in which decades), she says she received no help from the government. It was only in 1993 that small plots of land – barely an acre – on Sagar island were allotted to families whose houses on Ghoramara had been destroyed.
Given a choice Bhuyan would still live on Ghoramara. “Let me tell you why I love it. The people were more helpful. If a family lost its house, another would immediately offer its land for building a new one. That does not happen here,” she says with a sigh. Sadly, Khasimara village was completely submerged and Census 2011 recorded its population as zero. People still live in some of the other six villages on the island though – around 5,000 (Census 2011) across the Ghoramara gram panchayat area (and in the course of later years, this population has declined too).
Montu Mondol, who arrived in Gangasagar in 1993 along with other families from Ghoramara, has not forgotten the hardships of the early years on Sagar island. The land allotted to him by the government could not initially be cultivated because of high levels of soil salinity. Besides, fresh water for drinking and bathing was also scarce. To earn a livelihood, Mondal, now 65, did daily-wage work like digging and selling dried fish. On his 1.5 bighas (around half an acre) of land, he built a house and, over time, was able to cultivate rice too.
Photo: Siddharth AdelkarPhoto: Siddharth Adelkar. A precariously balanced wooden plank acts as a bridge between boats and Ghoramara island, where the embankments have been eroded by the Muri Gangariver
When he lived on Ghoramara, the river had destroyed Mondal’s house twice. “Till about 10-15 years ago, it would take 2-3 hours to walk from the north of Ghoramara to the south. Now it will take you under an hour to cover that distance,” he says.
Prof. Sugata Hazra at the School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, says that the displaced villagers of Ghoramara are not recognised as ‘climate refugees’ by the government because they were forced to migrate within the country. “But they should be recognised as environmental migrants, a category which the government should create, and ensure dignity and justice for these helpless people,” he adds.
Watch video: ‘Ghoramara was a land of happiness and gold’
According to an activist on Sagar island (who did not want to be named), from the 1970s to the 1990s, when people moved from Ghoramara to Sagar island, there were tensions between the migrants and the locals. He says, “The locals were unhappy that the areas for fishing were given away to people from Ghoramara. The number of people who needed fresh water also increased. The tensions reduced as time passed.”
Mondal and Bhuyan miss the kindness of people on Ghoramara island, but they haven’t made the trip back, even though it’s only a short boat ride away. Meanwhile, those who remain on Ghoramara have it tough. Sheikh Diljaan stands next to his cycle rickshaw near the landing point on Ghoramora, waiting to ferry people home. The island doesn’t have a jetty or a landing area at present – the river has taken it away. A precariously balanced wooden plank acts as a bridge between the boat and the island. Large parts of the embankment have eroded too, making the land difficult to walk on.
Watch video: The vanishing land beneath their feet
A few trips earn Diljaan Rs. 200-300 per day. To increase his income, he tried to grow paan leaves four years ago, but failed. “The plantation was washed away in less than a year. I did not expect the river to come so close to the land so quickly,” he says.
Ghoramara’s saline soil and water limit agricultural options, and many on the island have turned to cultivating cash crops like paan. The sandy silt soil, though susceptible to salinity, is suitable for growing paan. Islanders are known to pray to goddess Bindubashini for the health of their plantations. But even that could not save Diljaan’s paan leaves.
Besides limited livelihood options, the residents of Ghoramara also have to travel to Kakdwip city (a half-hour journey) for daily necessities like vegetables and food grains. One health sub-centre in Ghoramara caters to the basic health needs of the approximately 5,000 people on the island. For serious illnesses however, residents have to travel to the hospital in Kakdwip.
Photo: Siddharth AdelkarPhoto: Siddharth Adelkar. Due to a lack of work options, Sheikh Diljaan cultivated paan leaves on Ghoramara, but his plantation lost out to the water in less than a year
“I would be happy to leave this shrinking island with my wife and two sons,” says Diljaan. “But the government is not giving us land elsewhere.” After 1993, the government stopped resettling people on Sagar island reportedly because of a shortage of available land.
The lack of work on Sagar island is increasingly forcing the men in many families to migrate outside West Bengal in search of work. There is another worry – Sagar island is also shrinking and eroding every year, and its residents are fearful of losing their lands and homes yet again.
As we’re talking to Diljaan, who takes us on his rickshaw to a spot on the island where the river has swallowed up large chunks of land, Ranjita Purkait joins the conversation. Her house, which was washed away once, is a few metres from the river bank. “I might lose this house too. What has the government done? Nothing,” she says. “At least they could have strengthened the embankments! So many journalists come and take pictures and disappear. But our situation never changes. Will the government give us land elsewhere? This island is shrinking and our houses and lands are vanishing. Nobody cares.”
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 12 October 2017
Shikha Mondal lost her husband Asit in November 2015. “He went with two other men to the Garal river in the Baganbari forest to catch crabs. The other two returned and told me that a tiger carried my husband away,” she says. Asit Mondal was 32 when he died, the family’s sole earning member, and the father of two school-going sons.
Determined to claim compensation, Shikha, a resident of Jahar Colony village in West Bengal’s Gosaba block, paid a lawyer Rs. 10,000 to help her. “There were many documents to gather – no objection certificates (NOCs) from the police and Forest Department, insurance card, a letter from the village pradhan, and a death certificate.”
The lawyer managed to get the insurance company to pay Rs. 1 lakh in compensation. But Shikha was denied an NOC from the Forest Department because her husband died in the core area. The insurance company has not yet returned her documents.
Shikha now catches crabs and prawns, does odd jobs and agricultural labour, and somehow manages to send her sons to school. Unable to afford an independent household, she and her children live at an uncle’s house.
Thousands of women in the Sunderbans have similarly lost their husbands to tiger attacks. This delta region, spread over around 4,200 square kilometres in eastern India and home to the world’s largest mangrove forests, is synonymous with tigers.
Watch video: Shikha Mondal describes her ordeal of trying to get compensation after her husband died in 2015
The tigers in the forests of Hingalganj, Gosaba, Kultali, Pathar Pratima and Basanti blocks are a threat to the villagers who depend on the forests for their daily needs and livelihoods. These blocks are close to the Sundarbans National Park (and tiger reserve), which includes a core area of around 1,700 square kilometres and a buffer area of around 900 square kilometres, where some livelihood activities are allowed. Usually, it is the men in the villages here who venture into the forests to catch fish and crabs, or to gather honey and wood. In a face-off with a tiger, most often the man dies.
The exact number of women widowed in this manner in the Sundarbans is unknown, but locals, non-governmental organisations and others estimate the number is at least 3,000 over three decades – or around a 100 a year.
“Since 2011, nearly 250 women have lost their husbands to tiger attacks in Gosaba’s Lahiripur gram panchayat area [consisting of 22 villages],” says Arjun Mondal, who manages the Sundarbans Rural Development Society, an NGO that works for the welfare of the ‘tiger widows’. “Not a single one has received compensation,” he adds.
The women are entitled to total compensation of roughly Rs. 4-5 lakhs from the West Bengal government’s Forest Department, Fisheries Department and the state’s Group Personal Accident Insurance Scheme. However, there are many conditions; Arjun lists a few: “The husband should not have died in the core area, he should have had a boat licence certificate (BLC) and a permit from the Forest Department. Additionally, the wife is required to submit several documents to the different departments to get the compensation.”
Invariably, people from the villages do wander into the core area. Arjun, a fisherman himself, says, “We don’t realise where the buffer zone ends and the core area begins. The government issues very few BLCs, and not everyone can afford one. Getting permits also depends on the will of the Forest Department.”
Therefore, the odds are stacked against the wives of men who do not have BLCs or permits. The situation worsens when the men die in the core areas, which the villagers here are not allowed to enter at all, with or without permits.
As it did for Namita Biswas, 40, from Patharpara village in Gosaba block. Her husband Manoranjan, a fisherman, was attacked by a tiger in the core area in February 2015. He survived and was admitted to a hospital, but died a few days after he was discharged. “The infection from his head injury had not healed,” Namita explains. “My husband had a BLC, but the police refused to take my statement. We gave all our documents and medical bills to the Forest Department for reimbursement. The money is yet to come. There are so many widows like me. The government should at least give us a monthly pension.”
Purmila Burman was duped by an ‘agent’ claiming he could get compensation for her husband’s death
While Shikha and Namita still await compensation, Purmila Burman, 55, of Patharpara, has no such hope. In March 2016, her fisherman husband Shubhendu was killed by a tiger in the core area. “A middleman promised to help me when Shubhendu died. I gathered all my documents and gave them to him, believing he would help,” Purmila says. The agent has since disappeared with her documents, and she has received no compensation.
The Sundarbans are full of stories like these. In some families, consecutive generations of families have lost their men to tiger attacks. Most of the villages where this has happened have bidhoba paras or ‘widow localities’. In most households, the women’s lives are marked by distress and penury. It is difficult for them to re-marry since remarriage is frowned upon.
In July 2016, this writer filed three separate Right to Information (RTI) petitions enquiring about compensation for tiger widows with the West Bengal government’s Fisheries Department, Forest Department and Department of Sundarban Affairs.
Only the Fisheries Department responded: in the last six years, only five women – a tiny portion of the estimated 100 women whose husbands are killed by tigers every year – have filed for compensation with the department. Of them, only three received Rs. 1 lakh each. The other two were denied compensation since the postmortem reports for their husbands were not available.
But contrary to the Fisheries Department data, most of the women I talked to said that they had applied for compensation – so it is likely that their claims are not being accepted due to incomplete documents or other conditions they fail to meet.
“The entire process is daunting, with many documents to submit and a lot of running around. The woman may even be misled or might be unaware of the process,” says Pradip Chatterjee of the Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum. (The Fishworkers Forum of South Bengal, which is trying to help ‘tiger widows’ claim compensation and find work). “Meanwhile, fresh killings by tigers are reported every year, adding to the numbers of widowed women,” he says.
And some women, Chatterjee adds, fearful of the questioning by the Forest Department, ‘suppress’ the death of their husband, especially if he has been killed in the core area – they don’t even register it with the authorities, and nor do they claim compensation.
But Ranbibala Mondal of Patharpara village did try to claim the compensation. Her husband was attacked by a tiger many years ago. “After all these years, the government has given me nothing,” she says. “Can you do something?”
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 10 April 2017
The year was 1949. Jiban Krishna Poddar, 14 years old, fled from his home in Barisal district to West Bengal, along with his parents and grandmother. The Noakhali riots of 1946 had sparked off waves of migration which would continue for many years. Two years after their flight, the family made their way to the Sundarbans.
Now over 80 and seated in the verandah of his home on a rainy evening, he reminisces about the journey that brought him to Krishnadaspur village in Patharpratima block, the place he calls home: “There was violence, so we had to leave. My mother, Usha Rani Poddar, packed all our belongings into 14 bags. We reached Khulna city [then in East Bengal] by ship. A train took us to Benapole. We hid our money and ornaments in clothes and belongings.”
Jiban recalls that the family was taken to a refugee camp in Nadia district of West Bengal, where they lived for 11 months with more than 20,000 others. The refugees were asked to settle in Dandakaranya (the forested Bastar region of central India), the Andaman islands or the Sundarbans in West Bengal.
“My father, Sarat Chandra Poddar, chose the Sundarbans,” Jiban says. “He wanted to own and farm land. Maach and chaash (Bengali for fish and agriculture) were the two main attractions. He felt that the Dandakaranya and Andamans were uninhabited jungles where it would have been difficult to live.”
Jiban’s family was among the 150 families that left from Howrah for the Sundarbans by ship. They came to Mathurapur block where the Indian government asked them to clear the jungles for agriculture. “When we began farming, it was difficult. The area was 60 per cent water and 40 per cent jungle. The drinking water was not clean and many people died of cholera. The doctor would come once in 15 days. There was a famine and we had to suffer great hunger.”
Jiban’s father got a job in a government office where his task was to operate a hand fan for other employees. His mother kept buffaloes and sold milk and eggs.
The family was eventually allotted 10 bighas of land (one bigha is around one-third of an acre in West Bengal) in Krishnadaspur village, where they began cultivating rice. After saving some money, they bought more land and built a house in the village, which now has a population of 2,653 (2011 Census).
Jiban lives with his wife and 11 children, and retired as postmaster of the village post office around 2010. Priyaranjan Das, 64, who retired from the village post office as a peon, also traces his origins to East Bengal. He arrived from Noakhali with his parents in the early 1950s, when he was two years old. “We would boil stems and eat them since there was no food. There would be severe outbreaks of cholera, causing many people to leave. But we stayed on,” he remembers.
Many other families came to the Sundarbans from different parts of West Bengal, the Chota Nagpur Plateau and Odisha after 1765, when the East India Company acquired the civil administration in Bengal. Amites Mukhopadhyay ( Living with Disasters: Communities and Development in the Indian Sundarbans ) and Annu Jalais ( People and Tigers: An Anthropological Study of the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India ) write that the colonial rulers, interested in increasing their revenues, hired labourers from different parts of the subcontinent to reclaim and cultivate land.
Robi Mondal of the Tagore Society for Rural Development, a non-governmental organisation that works in the Sundarbans, says: “The floods and famine in Medinipur, the 1947 Partition of Bengal and the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence caused a further exodus of people, and many of them landed up in Sundarbans.”
Another round of migration took place around 1905, when Scottish businessman Daniel Hamilton was working towards rural reconstruction through a cooperative movement in the islands of Gosaba block. He leased out land to labourers for cultivation. Many of the descendants of the migrants still live in Gosaba, and remember his contribution to the development of the Sundarbans.
Eighty-year-old Revati Singh, who lives in Jotirampur village, is originally from Ranchi. His grandfather, Anandmai Singh, came to Gosaba in 1907, during Hamilton’s cooperative movement. “He arrived in Canning block by tram. They would probably have walked from there to Gosaba, which is currently more than 12 hours on foot. Later, Hamilton built small boat launches to transport them.”
Lakhan and Sandhya Sardar. Lakhan’s grandfather migrated from Ranchi to Gosaba in the early 1900s
Mohammed Molhor Sheikh’s great grandfather arrived in the Sundarbans from Midnapore some 150 years ago
Revati has heard that the population at the time was small, and there were recurring attacks by tigers and crocodiles, and no clean drinking water. Has the situation changed? “Fewer tigers attack now,” he says. “There were no jobs then, and even now getting work is a problem. I used to cultivate rice but stopped because the river would overflow into the fields.” Revati’s three sons have informal jobs.
Lakhan Sardar, whose grandfather Bhagal Sardar also migrated from Ranchi to be a part of the cooperative movement, remembers that on Hamilton’s invitation, renowned poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore visited Gosaba in 1932.
A large section of the population of the Sundarbans is from the Medinipur area of West Bengal. Frequent flood and famine in Medinipur drove inhabitants to the Sundarbans to work as labourers or cultivators of land. Jyotirmoy Mondal from Jotirampur village recalls that his grandparents walked from Medinipur to the Sundarbans before the onset of Hamilton’s cooperative movement. “Grandfather became a night watchman and eventually died of fever. My grandmother, Digambari Mondal, would guard people’s buffaloes for a living, cultivate rice and sell ghee.”
Mohammed Molhor Sheikh cuts wood for a living in Arampur village in Gosaba. His great grandfather came with two brothers from Medinipur to the Sundarbans, 150 years ago. “We heard stories of how they would chase tigers with iron rods flaming with fire. We also heard how they would frequently suffer flood and famine and the destruction of their rice fields.”
Another wave of migration from Medinipur occurred during the severe 1943 famine in West Bengal. Seventy-one-year-old Haripriya Kar’s husband’s family migrated to Gosaba during this period. The village Jotirampur, where she lives, is named after Jotiram Kar, her father-in-law. “Jotiram and Khetramohan were brothers who came from Medinipur to Gosaba, bringing 27 families with them. These families cleared the surrounding forests and settled down,” she says.
Haripriya’s house is cast in darkness as she speaks. The electricity was cut a few hours ago. Livelihood options here are few, it is difficult to get medical help, and connectivity with roads and transport is a huge hurdle. Still, the descendants of the original settlers of the Sundarbans do not have it as hard as their ancestors did. The struggle for a better life continues, even as they recollect the hardships and deprivations of the past.
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 11 January 2017
Purnima Mistry walks out of the Raimangal river with her fishing net, water swirling around her waist. She has been swimming near the riverbank for half-an-hour, dragging the net behind her in search of tiger prawn seedlings.
On the riverbank, she sorts the contents of the net, separating the seedlings from weeds, twigs and other fish. Her saree and plait are beginning to dry under the hot sun. But Purnima has to get back to the river again. “I have to collect enough tiger prawn seedlings so that I can sell them. It will take another 2-3 hours,” she says.
Squatting on the muddy bank to sort the catch, Purnima talks about the long hours she spends in saline waters and mud, which cause skin infections and itches. “Look how difficult our jobs are,” she says. “This is how the people of Sundarbans live and eat.”
Purnima started doing this work two years ago to support her family, which includes two daughters and a son. Her husband is afraid of water and cannot go fishing, which is the most common occupation here. So he grows vegetables for sale at home.
Watch video: Purnima Mistry trawls through the Raimangal river to catch enough seedlings to sell
Is she afraid of encountering crocodiles and tigers – both common in some parts of the Sundarbans? “Sometimes, I am scared of crocodiles; they have attacked people in this village,” Purnima says. “The tigers do not come to here because a security net near the forest keeps them away.”
Purnima lives in Jogesganj, a village of 7,000-plus people and houses scattered along the banks of the Raimangal river in Hingalganj block of West Bengal. Many of the women and children in Jogesganj, like in the rest of the Sundarbans, work as seedling collectors. This supplements their household incomes from the sale of fish and crabs, and of forest products such as honey and wood.
State government data [from 2009] shows that poverty drives more than 2 lakh people – of the 44 lakhs who live in the Sundarbans – to collect tiger prawn seedlings.
Shoma Mondal of Hemnagar village says this work is mostly done by women. “Men go after bigger catch like crabs, which fetch better returns [and for which they hire boats in groups]. Gathering seedlings becomes the women’s task, and in very poor houses, even children [do this work]. The returns are poor but there are no other options. At least one woman from every household in the village does this work. We cannot do much agriculture, because for much of the year the soil and water are saline, except in the monsoons, when we cultivate rice.”
Left: The people who collect tiger prawn seedlings spend close to five hours in the water to get a sufficient catch. Right: A woman drags her net into the river at low tide, which is the best time to gather the seedlings
Shoma goes to the river almost every day at low tide in search of seedlings. Low tides are the best for a good catch – but they occur at different times. So Shoma sometimes goes to the river at midnight or at 4 a.m. “When it is pitch dark, we are unable to see if there are crocodiles or other wild animals nearby. In the daylight, at least we can see them and move away.”
The earnings of seedling collectors like Purnima and Shoma vary according to the season. “During winter, which is peak season, we get Rs. 300 per 1,000 seedlings,” she says. “At other times, the prices can drop to Rs. 100 and even sink as low as Rs. 60.”
On good days, the catch reaches 2,000 seedlings, but this is only a few times a year. Most other times, Shoma only manages to net 200-500 seedlings. “It’s enough money to go to the market [in Hemnagar] and buy essentials [like rice and pulses], but nothing more,” she says.
After cultivation in brackish water enclosures in South 24 Parganas district, the seedlings grow in size
During the winter months, from December to February, Shoma goes to Erode district in Tamil Nadu to work in a garments factory, where she stitches curtains and pillow covers. Although winter can bring the highest rates for the seedlings, many women try to not work in the biting cold river waters. Shoma’s husband Soumen Mondol works full-time in the same factory in Erode. She earns between Rs. 200-500 daily, he earns a little more. Their five-year-old daughter stays back in the village with her grandmother.
The methods of collecting prawn seedlings have been criticised by environmentalists as well as the state’s Forest Department. The nets trap many other fish species besides the seedlings. But the women usually discard the other fish, which can deplete those species. The dragging of nets causes soil erosion and weakens embankments meant to prevent rivers from overflowing.
Purnima however does not throw away the other fish. She has a pond near her home, where she harvests these species. “Those who do not have ponds have to throw away the remaining fish,” she explains, as she continues to sort the seedlings on the Raimangal riverbank.
Although the tiger prawn trade rests on the labour of the women in these villages, they are paid the least along the chain. After the seedlings are collected, men take over the profitable part of the trade.
Typically, middlemen visit the villages to purchase the seedlings from the women and sell it for cultivation in bheries. These are large artificial enclosures for brackish water aquaculture in Canning, Jibantala, Sarberia and other locations in the South 24 Parganas district. Here, the seedlings are cultivated for at least three months during which they grow in size. Then they are sold in the wholesale markets of Canning, Barasat and Dhamakhali , and sent onward for export – often by men on motorbikes who carry the seedlings in plastic bags full of water.
After cultivation in brackish water enclosures in South 24 Parganas district, the seedlings grow in size
Full-grown tiger prawns fetch attractive prices in the wholesale markets. Tarun Mondal, a wholesaler in the Canning fish market, says his main income comes from tiger prawns. “It is good business. We buy them at a rate of Rs. 380-880 per kilo from the bheries, and we sell them for Rs. 400-900 [per kilo, depending on size]. Our profit margin is Rs. 10- 20 [per kilo]. Most of our supply is from the Sunderbans, from blocks such as Basanti and Gosaba. We sell them to agents who work for bigger companies that ultimately export them.”
India’s seafood exports were valued at $4.68 billion in 2015-16 ; shrimps constitute almost 70 per cent of these exports and are mostly exported to Japan, China and the United States. Tiger prawns, also known as black tiger shrimps, are an important part of shrimp exports. West Bengal is one of India’s largest shrimp producers and exporters of seafood.
Seedling collectors like Shoma and Purnima though see only a fraction of this money. The women are unable to demand higher prices because the agents determine their rates and control the trade. “In addition to the price of seedlings, the middleman gives us an annual deposit [of Rs. 200-500 per person], which we don’t have to return, ” Shoma says. “The deposit forces us to sell only to him, and nobody else. We women are unable to gather in large numbers and bargain.” But it is the labour of workers like Shoma and Purnima that sustains the wholesale and export markets in tiger prawns, and brings these expensive delicacies to upscale plates in India and around the world.
Published in People’s Archive of Rural India. 23 September 2016
“I grabbed the kamot with my arms. You can see its teeth marks even now.” Nitai Joddar, a mouley (honey collector), remembers exactly when a kamot (crocodile) bit him, from hip to leg. It was on March 23 in 1980, and he had gone to the Raimangal river to catch fish.
Nitai, of Hemnagar village in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, is 41 now. His father, a honey collector, started taking him along on his work trips to the jungle when he was 10. After the kamot incident, Nitai began wearing an amulet as a safeguard. Encounters with crocodiles are common on the riverbanks of many parts of the Sundarbans. People, especially fish workers, have been injured or have even been killed.
Nitai Joddar wore this armlet after being bitten by a crocodile, and has placed his complete trust in it to protect him in the jungles of the Sundarbans
Collecting honey for sale is a common occupation in the Sundarbans – and it can be very hazardous. For Nitai and others, just as real as the possibility of being attacked by a crocodile, is the threat of tigers while fishing or collecting honey from the dense jungles. According to the website of the Department of Sundarbans Affairs, “…men in the Sundarbans are attacked by wild animals – sharks, crocodiles, or tigers… especially when fishermen or honey collectors enter the dense mangrove forests…” Women, of course, are equally at risk of such attacks, though usually the community does not allow them to go on the extended honey gathering trips.
Honey is collected in the Sundarbans mainly from April to June. During these months, the state government bans the catching of fish, so that the fish can replenish themselves. This is when many fishermen become honey collectors and make two trips to the jungle, each lasting 15 days or longer. West Bengal is a major honey-producing state and exports a large part of its production.
Collecting honey requires advance preparations. The honey gatherers inform the Forest Department, rent a boat whose owner has a BLC (boat licence certificate) and borrow from the money lender or mahajan . Nitai’s son Sanjit Joddar, 23, explains: “If five or six people go together to collect honey, we take a combined loan of Rs. 10,000-15,000. The interest is 2-3 per cent, which we repay along with principle in 30-45 days. The loan is taken once a year.”
Mouleys of the Sundarbans’ (right to left): Nitai Joddar, Binay Mondal and Haripada Joddar
The loan is required to buy provisions for the 15-day journey. Renting the boat costs Rs. 2,800-3,000 for the season [a little over 60 days between April to June] of honey collecting. The boat owner is also paid in kind – with a few kilos of honey. Another Rs. 120 is paid annually to the Forest Department as insurance in case of an accident in the jungle. After clearing all debts and payments, each mouley gets Rs. 15,000-25,000 [for the entire season].
At times, the mouleys incur another expense: dacoits in the jungles steal from them or even kidnap them. Nitai recalls an instance when a few men were kidnapped last year and their families had to put together Rs. 2-3 lakhs for their release.
“We set off on when the sky is clear and the river is at low tide,” Nitai says. “It takes several hours to reach our location, depending on the tide. We leave the boat and enter the jungle. One person stays behind to row the boat along the bank. When some honey is gathered, it is deposited in the boat. We eat and sleep in the boat itself.”
The direction in which the bees fly guides the mouleys to the trees with hives. “We prepare bundles, layered with dry leaves and green hetal leaves, which are attached to sticks,” Nitai says. “We burn the bundles and the ensuing smoke curls up to the hives, driving away the bees. A sharp curved instrument is used to break the hive. We do not break the entire hive, since it needs to regrow.”
A beehive on a tree in Hemnagar village / The sharp and curved instrument used to break the bee hives
Sometimes the bees sense the threat and sting even before the smoke rises. But Nitai and his co-workers have no use for ointments or protective clothing. “We only pluck out the sting with our fingers. Once a man was stung by 300-400 bees. He could not get up or eat for weeks!”
Nitai expresses faith in two things: his amulet and Bonbibi, protector of the forests and people, a highly revered deity in the Sundarbans. “There are different chants to the goddess according to the difficulty of the situation,” he says. We ask him to recite a chant; he breathlessly rattles off one in Bengali that the honey gatherers use when leaving home for the jungle.
As often happens when in the Sundarbans, the conversation turns to tigers. And everyone has a story or two to tell. “Once a tiger confronted my friend and he froze with terror,” Nitai recalls. “I chanted some mantras to Bonbibi – but could not rescue him and the tiger killed him. I found the body and took it to his home. Many years ago, about 150-200 men surrounded a tiger in the jungle. Even then it carried away 1-2 people.”
There was a time, he says, when the government rewarded villagers for killing tigers. “But now, one cannot touch them, because of laws.” Nitai, like others living in the Sundarbans, sometimes feels that the state protects the tiger more than the people. “We cannot even go to the forest in case we disturb the tiger’s sleep,” he jokes. But he knows that tigers are important and is a member of the local Forest Protection Committee, a part of the government’s forest management strategy. “If the tiger goes, Sundarbans goes. Nothing will stop people from entering and destroying the forests.”
We go to Nitai’s small and cramped house, where he stores honey in aluminium containers and cans on the floor. “Depending on which trees and flowers – kewra, goran, khols i – you extract it from and the season, the colour and taste varies. But your commercial honey looks and tastes exactly the same through the year.”
The honey is stored in an aluminium container. Its colour and taste vary according to the trees, flowers and seasons, unlike commercial honey which tastes and looks the same throughout the year
Usually, 6-7 individuals participate in a single 15-day trip and gather roughly 1-1.5 quintals of honey each. The mouleys are compelled to sell most of the collected honey to the Forest Department at a price fixed by the government. The price this year, Sanjit says, was Rs. 115 for a kilo – and in August 2016 the price at which the department sold the honey in the market was Rs. 300 a kilo. The West Bengal Forest Development Cooperation Limited refines and markets it as the Mouban brand of honey.
This year, instead of all the collected honey, the Forest Department specified a quota that the mouleys were required to deposit. “They did not buy honey from our family because the department met its quota early,” Sanjit says. He and his family plan to sell the surplus themselves. “We collected 80-90 kilos and have priced it at Rs. 200-250 per kilo for the neighbouring village areas. In Kolkata, we can get a higher rate.”
In previous years, Sanjit says, “We could take home only five kilos. We had to deposit the rest with the Forest Department. They searched our boats for hidden honey. If caught selling in the market, our boats could be seized.”
Although Sanjit, like his father, is a fisherman and honey collector, he migrates for 2-3 months every year to Bangalore and Chennai to work on construction sites where he earns Rs. 350-400 per day. “My father and his friends have worked only in the Sundarbans. They have fallen in love with the forest and say there cannot be peace without it. My generation goes to bidesh [outside] to work. How do we feed our family just by catching fish and collecting honey?”
Sanjit had to drop out before completing his BA degree to help with his family’s earnings. He now has an 18-month-old son who he wants to educate. “My son should not go to the jungles. Too dangerous.”
But Nitai believes that those who migrate are not happy, since there are more chances of getting cheated or murdered in the big cities. To him, the dangers of working in the Sundarbans seem preferable.
Nitai Joddar, 41, started going to the jungles with his father, also a honey collector, three decades ago
In 2015, a Trinamool Congress member of Parliament, Pratima Mandal, highlighted these dangers in the Lok Sabha when she spoke of the issues faced by the honey collectors of the Sundarbans. She asked the central government to take safety measures and allot funds.
It may be too early to know if this has had an impact, but over the years a few measures have indeed been taken. Pradip Chatterjee, president of the Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum (Fishworkers Forum of South Bengal), says, “There have been some improvements. Four years ago, the Forest Department would pay the mouleys only Rs. 42 per kilo of honey; now the rate is more than Rs. 100 for a kilo, and they are free to sell extra honey in the market. The department would earlier give only one pass of 15 days for honey collection, now they give two such passes.”
However, he says, nothing has been done to protect the men at work. “There is no provision for their individual safety or safety as a group.” And so, men like Nitai continue working in the dense and dangerous jungles without any safeguards.
