Geeta Rani Das, 65, of Dakshin Kasiabad village in Ramgopalpur Block of the Sunderbans marks up her age with cyclones. Five days after she was struck by one more cyclone—Amphan this time—I saw her searching for anything of any value around her ravaged mud-made home.

Strewn everywhere were piles of wet straw that had once been her roof. Geeta Rani Das appeared composed and unperturbed even in the ruins. “Jhar niyei to bachi amra” (We live with storms)—she declared without a flicker of emotion.

Everyone in the Sunderbans shares the same fatalist outlook of Geeta Rani Das as long as ‘jhar’ or storms (cyclone, tornado, typhoon) are discussed. In their Strategy Report for the Sustainable Development of the Sunderbans (published in 2014), the Environment and Water Resources Management Unit of the World Bank calculated that on an average 2.5 tropical cyclone events originate in the Bay of Bengal every year, which culminate into a landfall in the Indian part of the Sunderbans. The corresponding figures for Bangladesh and Srilanka are 0.9 and 0.7. The people of Sunderbans thus take the storms for granted. They were struck by Cyclone Fani on 5^th May last year, by Bulbul again on 9^th November, and this time by the Amphan on 20^th May. So, number of cyclonic events that ravaged the Sunderbans in the last 12 months is little over the expected average. People of Sunderbans know these figures better than the World Bank.

Once a trading hub that got rich through naval trade with Europe and South Asia, the Sunderbans started thinning out of people in the 16^th century as Arakanese pirates practically blocked every navigable stream, and people found the terrain hopelessly inhospitable for agriculture or fishing. In 1771 the British Collector General Clod Russell first thought of dividing the Sunderbans into plots and leasing those plots to prospective landlords, for extracting timber. This plan was put into effect by Tillman Henkel—the then Magistrate of Jessore district—in 1781, which in turn saw a good surge in population as the new landholders brought in poor farming communities into the Sunderbans, particularly from the present East Midnapore district of West Bengal, and helped them to settle down to clear the forest for cultivable land. After partition India could retain only 38% of undivided Sunderbans, and over it considerable number of families migrated from its East Pakistan part to the 3600 sq. km India could hold on to, pushing the population of Indian Sunderbans to 1.15 million as per the 1951 Census. This figure would eventually rise to 4.44 million in the 2011 Census. In 1984 a further 1330 sq. km area was declared a National Park and freed of people. The Land Reform Program carried out by the Left Front Government in the 80s distributed the ever shrinking cultivable lands to an ever increasing number of families, which effectively resulted into millions of noodle-strip landholders who can produce just enough for their own consumption from the land they hold. To earn a little cash the farmers turned to cultivating betel leaf in whatever little area they can manage to spare. They also borrow to take a pond on lease and rear fishes in it. These are, grossly, the three options of livelihood a farming family in the Sunderbans can avail of.  A fatal cyclone can ruin all these 3 options and that too for years. Amphan did just that.

Almost every village in the Sunderbans is located beside one or more rivers that are right on the point of draining out into the Bay of Bengal. Strong tidal waves—part of a cyclone—cause a surge of saline water in the estuaries which in turn can submerge a village. Embankments—known as ‘Bandh’ in Bengali—are therefore essential protective barriers to keep away overflowing rivers from flooding agricultural land with saline water. If a plot of land is submerged, it takes nearly 4 years to make it productive again. Since the Sunderbans is a low land and the sea level around it is estimated to be rising by about 9 mm per annum, these mud-brick embankments (more mud, rarely brick) collapse with expected regularity against strong tidal pressure, particularly if tides soar to a height of 6 meter as in Amphan. 

In Sunderbans’ villages small ponds leased to rear fishes are filled in by rain water, and nurtures solely fresh-water fishes. A little increase in salinity in water kills the fishes just in minutes. During Amphan small ponds everywhere had been over-flooded with saline water coming from the rivers, either breaking or sneaking through the village embankments. Betel leaf (‘paan’) needs protection from direct exposure to the sun, which is provided through a solid cover of cloth and straw (known as ‘boroj’ in Bengali). Wind velocity of about 185 km/h—and that too for an uninterrupted period of 10-12 hours during Amphan—blown away the covers, and strong salinity of air along with absence of shade for subsequent number of days destroyed this crop thoroughly. Only consolation for the farmers is that by 20^th May fields were mostly cleared of Boro crops, though a good proportion got damaged because of the rain. However, this assures that this time at least the farming community in the Sunderbans will not go hungry. There is another consolation that Amphan caused relatively fewer loss of life, as good care was taken to evacuate villages and shift the villagers into cyclone-shelters well in time.

400 Royal Bengal Tigers besides, the Sunderbans is also home to nearly 4.5 million people who mostly live in the margin. As per the previously mentioned World Bank Survey, 31 to 65 percent in Sunderbans’ 19 Blocks are BPL households. After 60 days of lockdown because of Covid 19, their situation got more desperate as all non-agricultural economic activities remained suspended. Farmers couldn’t take their surplus crop to nearby towns and earn a little extra in cash. Over years every family grown in number of members though their holding on land remained the same. This created a huge number of surplus (and unskilled) labors in the Sunderbans who were made to migrate to other States to earn a wage for shockingly cash-deprived families. Lockdown meant that all these families didn’t receive their monthly remittances. Amphan struck right on this shattered economic structure. Now more than ever the cyclone-struck victims of the Sunderbans cannot afford to make good their losses. A survey conducted in 2014 showed that only 9% households by then could recover their losses caused by cyclone Aila, way back in 2009. This indicates what to expect this time as a much broader economic collapse seems a certainty in near future.

Over generations the people of the Sunderbans adopted the courage and tenacity required to keep on living in their deadly terrain. In that sense they are quite close to their closest neighbors—the tigers. [Official Website]