Promila (centre) with one of her daughters and a relative outside her tarpaulin tent. (Bishwarup Dutta)

Oct. 3: Promila Mandal’s family survived Aila’s fury but face a winter as half-fed destitutes with just a tarpaulin sheet for cover.

In the Sunderbans, Promila’s story is echoed in every home, or rather under every plastic tent. “We don’t know how we will survive the winter,” said Promila, visiting her home for Puja in Lahiripur on the Satjelia island.

She works as a domestic help in Sonarpur, on Calcutta’s outskirts.

Promila and her family waited for four months — the cyclone struck the Sunderbans on May 25 — for government aid to rebuild their home. Last month, the 34-year-old school dropout left the tent in search of a job and landed in Sonarpur.

She gets Rs 1,000 and two meals a day but her family — husband Rabin, immobile with a broken hip after a wall fell on him during the cyclone, daughters Falguni, 17, and Aruna, 14, and son Tapan, 9 — make do with chirey (flattened rice) and gur (jaggery) under the tent on the Bidyadhari’s bank. The tent and the frugal food are all the government has given them.

Promila’s family has two-bighas on which they grew rice and seasonal fruits and vegetables. Food security from their own land and an annual income of around Rs 15,000 was enough for a decent life. But the plot is now under saline water that rushed in during the cyclone.

Many families in the Sunderbans depended on their land for daily food and almost all 19 blocks face the problem of land turning infertile after Aila struck.

“There is no question of harvest on this land. The saline water has made the land so barren. It will take a few years to get a decent yield. I don’t know what is going to happen,” Promila said.

Before the cyclone, the area under cultivation in the Sunderbans was above three lakh hectares, of which almost 45 per cent produced more than one crop — the rabi and aman varieties of rice, supplemented with vegetables.

Data available with the district agricultural office show that more than 90 per cent people in the Sunderbans depend on agriculture.

“Hardly any sowing has been done this time. A food crisis seems inevitable in a couple of months,” Kanti Ganguly, minister for Sunderbans affairs, told The Telegraph.

What is the solution then?

“We need to de-water (pump out saline water) at least 1.5 lakh ponds in the Sunderbans so that rain water can be retained and the farmers can plough. For that, we require close to Rs 21 crore but have only Rs 6 crore. We have been able to de-water less than 40 per cent of the ponds because of the lack of funds,” Ganguly said.

Only de-watering, however, will not help as the villagers need sustained relief, said Tushar Kanjilal, associated with development work on the islands for over five decades. “The people of the Sunderbans depend on local produce in a big way. But this time it is going to be a lean harvest. The government has to launch a sustained relief initiative to support the people. Otherwise, the people here will die of hunger,” Kanjilal said.

Both Ganguly and Kanjilal agreed that the government had failed in handling the crisis. The Centre sanctioned Rs 478 crore for Aila relief over and above the Rs 1,000 crore to build embankments.

The government had announced Rs 10,000 for each family without a home. In the Gosaba block alone, 40,195 houses were destroyed completely and 6,672 were partially damaged. The Rs 10,000 was to come from the central calamity relief fund. But the villagers are yet to see the money.

The district administration attributed the delay in disbursing money to discrepancies in lists containing victims’ names. “On checking the list we found that many people from the same family gave their names. We will be able to release the funds after the list is reviewed,” said subdivisional officer Mohammed Shahid.

While the administration dithers, people like Promila have started leaving the Sunderbans. “Last Puja was so different,” she said, her eyes turning moist. “We had new clothes, we ate good food.”

This time, there was only chirey.