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.
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 Cylone 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.
The extraction, exploitation and exclusion continued under colonial rule. By the 1880s, timber from the mangrove forests became the commodity of choice. ‘Scientific’ forestry was introduced. As more people got settled, human-animal conflicts increased. The government’s response in 1883, as revealed through archival research by Ranjan Chakrabarti, was to introduce a reward system of paying Rs 50 for killing an adult tiger and Rs 10 for each cub, both huge sums of money at the time.
After Independence, by the 1980s, the focus had shifted to tiger conservation. While new laws to protect mangrove forests and its rich biodiversity got introduced, access of locals to the forest areas got restricted and many local occupations connected to the forest that had emerged to serve colonial interests got banned.
Ecologically, the inhabited islands are now distinctly different from the mangrove forests. The mangrove vegetation in these islands have all but disappeared. The hydrology of these islands — the tidal interplay so essential for sustaining a mangrove forest — has been completely transformed to be able to support agriculture. They now have an agrarian economy that has been imposed on what used to be a mangrove ecosystem. Yet, it is not uncommon for a person from a marginalised background to go into the forest to fish, catch crabs or collect honey, eke out a living during monsoon as a farm labourer or as a marginal farmer, and even resort to seasonal migration for certain months to work as a daily wager. Ironically, if the mangrove ecosystem thrives naturally, most aspects of the local economy of the settled areas, as it exists now, will collapse. Understandably, sustaining local livelihoods in the Sundarbans is a significant development priority for the government and construction of concrete embankments have become a pivotal part of the government’s developmental efforts.
A recent conversation during a visit to the Sundarbans with an acquaintance was an eye-opener for me. Chapal is from a landless family whose mud hut seemed especially vulnerable, located just outside an embankment right at the edge of a mangrove forest. Sitting in it, I could not stop myself from asking how people like Chapal coped with storm surges and high winds during cyclones. Chapal commented that when alerts were issued for Cyclone Amphan in 2020, the family got into a small dinghy and took shelter inside the mangrove forest. Seeing my perplexed look, he smiled and said gently, “You will not get it, the forest is our second home, we go there all the time to catch fish and crabs.”
There is a lot to unpack from his response.
I know that mangroves are important shock absorbers during cyclones, floods and tsunamis. But, through my lived experiences, I cannot imagine a mangrove forest as a safe space. I realised that the loss of mangrove cover of the inhabited islands has increased their vulnerability during climate-change-influenced events. More importantly, I realised that whether it is our imagination of the Sundarbans as home to the Bengal Tiger, or the decision to construct concrete embankments, to keep locals away as the principal way of protecting the forest, normalise the extraction of timber and the destruction of the ecosystem through ‘scientific’ forestry, perceive the mangrove ecosystem as a ‘wasteland’, the fate of Sundarbans’ landscape has always been shaped by the outsiders’ perceptions of it. Locals like Chapal, who feel most at home in the landscape and know it intimately, have never had any say in determining its fate.
It is now accepted globally that mangrove ecosystems play an important role in protecting biodiversity by serving as nurseries for many marine species. They are also a powerful natural ally against climate change, acting as efficient carbon sinks and shock absorbers during cyclones, floods and tsunamis. In the Sundarbans, the stakes are already very high. With the right systems and policies in place, millions of people like Chapal who have an intimate knowledge of the hyper-localised ecosystems that they have lived in and have observed across generations can play a game-changing role in aligning the local economy with the mangrove ecology. This will also transform how we imagining disaster risk-reduction measures for the landscape.
If we are able to put our acts together, then, maybe, the local economy, people’s lives and the mangrove ecosystem will all thrive in the Sundarbans of the future.