Helping Hand on the Sundarbans

Happiness delivery: Baikunthapur Tarun Sangha helps people in the Sundarbans’ remote coastal villages battle grim lives by taking care of their basic needs

- ROMITA DATTA

Bit by bit, Sushanta Giri's mother wasted away, as the deadly liver ailment progressed. The family, who live in the remote Baikunthapur village in the Sundarbans in West Bengal, had no means to take her to the nearest subdivisional hospital at Joynagar, 49 km away, for treatment.

Giri's eyes well up as he recalls those nights when his mother suffered acute pain, and how he frantically did the rounds of village quacks for some palliative. Giri's mother passed away the day he wrote the final paper of his school-leaving board exam. Back from the funeral, the 18-year-old resolved to help improve the living condition of the people who live in these coastal backwaters-the very margins both geographically and socio-economically so that they could access the basic needs of life.

For thousands of underprivileged villagers in the Sundarbans, life is not just about coping with poverty and the absence of healthcare, education and roads and communication, it is also fraught by a constant struggle with nature—cyclones, flash  floods, farmland laid waste by saline water from the sea, and land erosion. Giri embarked on a comprehensive plan of community development and self-sufficiency, so that villagers could send their children to schools and share in the possibilities of a rapidly digitizing world.