P
rayers, though, were clearly not enough for Mondal's neighbour Dibakar Bhandari who was forced to flee his home at Lohachara and settle in Sagar in 1975. "The sea started gobbling up my land at Lohachara. Some measures were undertaken to stop the erosion and save the embankments. But we couldn't stop the sea. All the 4,675 acres went under, and 5,000 of us became refugees. Man, ultimately, can't fight nature," he says. Bhandari's simple folk wisdom finds echo in the opinion of experts like Atanu Raha's. The director, Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve, holds that the emergence and submergence of islands is a natural phenomenon and can't be resisted by man.
Some feel the islands in the Sundarbans on the Bangladeshi side are better off. Nanigopal Pramanik, a prominent trader at Sagar, has relatives in the Bangladesh islands and travels there frequently. "They have strong embankments paved with boulders and concrete that can easily withstand the highest tides and the severest lashing by waves," he says. "The Bangladesh government has invested a lot in these embankments."
Others, however, see Bangladesh itself as the problem. An oceanographer associated with the SoOS, who doesn't want to be named, points out that the inhabitants of most of the islands in the Indian part of the Sundarbans are illegal migrants from Bangladesh and are themselves largely responsible for their plight. "These islands were occupied by migrants from Bangladesh when they were still very young and not fit for habitation," he says. "The migrants forcibly claimed these islands from the sea by building embankments around them. Years of habitation and human activities like farming and building structures led to the islands sinking instead of rising, which they would have if left undisturbed."
Such cold logic does little to address human suffering. "What will people do? Where will they go when they lose their lands, homes and livelihood," asks Milan Parua, the MLA from Sagar, who has been unable to marshal the funds for or get the government to act on emergency measures to save the 14 islands. "Many people who were once affluent farmers have become migrant labourers working far away in Gujarat and other parts of the country." Says Ghoramara gram panchayat head Patra: "We aren't mainlanders and so don't get the attention we deserve. Ghoramara, after all, is not Singur or Nandigram, even though our future is much bleaker than the residents of those centres of raging controversies." Between the devil and the deep blue sea, it's all come horribly alive for some Sundarbans island folk.