Voices from the forest

The Indian side of the Sundarbans - the world’s largest mangrove forest — is spread across approximately 4,000 square kilometres, consisting of 102 islands. Of these, 54 islands are inhabited and are administratively divided into 181 gram panchayats across six blocks of North 24 Parganas district and 13 blocks of South 24 Parganas district in West Bengal.

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The region is home to around five million people, many of whom are facing severe livelihood crises triggered by the increased frequency of climate-change-influenced events like cyclones, tidal surges, erratic rainfall and so on. The most devastating cyclone to hit the area in the recent past was Cyclone Aila in 2009. The last significant cyclone before Aila was in 1988; but in the last six years, five major cyclones — Fani and Bulbul in 2019, Amphan in 2020, Yaas in 2021 and Remal in 2024 — have impacted the region.

While most of these events automatically get termed as natural disasters, a key point to note is that not everything is ‘natural’ in these ‘natural disasters’.

There is clear evidence that local, man-made factors are exacerbating the devastation in many such events. In fact, the present crises have been in the making for close to 250 years. They are a result of an inability to understand and align with the natural mangrove ecosystem of the area.

The British saw the mangrove landscape of the Sundarbans as a wasteland. Profit was a key motivation in the 1780s when East India Company officials actively pushed socially and economically marginalised people to settle down in the Sundarbans. The company had faced a severe financial crisis and, in 1773, had received from the British government what the historian, William Dalrymple, has termed as history’s first mega corporate bailout.

For the EIC officials, clearing mangrove forests to bring more land under rice cultivation was a commercial decision.