Mousuni
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As in 2019
Tamaghna Banerjee, May 15, 2019: The Times of India
From: Tamaghna Banerjee, May 15, 2019: The Times of India
On this Bay of Bengal island that is one of the last outposts of Indian democracy, voters have a bizarre problem: most have a voter card, but many have lost, forever, the plot of land that is mentioned on their cards as their permanent address.
Welcome to Mousuni, a 26-sq-km island at the southernmost tip of mainland Bengal, lying about 120km from Kolkata, which makes it one of the remotest permanently inhabited islands in the Bay of Bengal. On Sunday, residents of this island in the south-western part of the Sunderbans will go to vote despite knowing that no politician has a solution to their unique problem: approximately 6,000 out of the 28,000-odd residents of this island have permanently lost their land to the rising sea over the past one decade.
Mousuni has its entire western portion exposed to the Bay of Bengal. With the sea level rising, large masses of the island are being gobbled up by the waves.
Anwara Bibi, a resident of Baliara in the southern part of Mousuni, points towards the remains of two coconut trees in the middle of the sea where her home once used to be, till three years ago. “There was my house, spread across 10 bighas (one bigha is roughly equal to 0.40 acres),” she says.
Erosion may claim half of the island in next 50 yrs
I had a home and fields to plough. Now, all I am left with is a broken hut on a small strip of refugee land. My husband had to switch his profession overnight — from being a farmer to a mason in Kolkata — and here I am living with two children. Every night, I fear getting washed away by the sea.”
Anwara’s home is just metres away from the raging sea. She has had to build a small earthen embankment around her home, but it is anyone’s guess as to how effective these would actually prove.
Her neighbour, Jannatun Bibi (31), flashes her voter card, showing the address of her home. “This address is no more. It is under sea. We will do our duty and cast our vote, but will the new government do something to get back our homes? Frankly, we don’t expect anything now. I don’t even know the candidates participating in the election,” she says, upset and visibly angry at government apathy over the years.
The island falls under Mathurapur Lok Sabha constituency, which had been a Left Front bastion since 1989 before Trinamool Congress’ Choudhury Mohan Jatua won the election in 2009. He won the seat again in 2014 and is contesting for the third time. His challengers are BJP’s Shyamaprasad Halder and CPM’s Sarat Haldar. Spread over four mouzas — Baliara, Kusumtala, Bagdanga and Mousuni — Baliara and Kusumtala are now most vulnerable with 5-6 sq km of land sinking under the sea every year.
Trinamool leader and panchayat member Quayyum Khan says the government is trying its best to prevent the erosion by building a 2.5km-long embankment around the southern part of the island. “The state government is trying its best but the pace of sea eroding the land has increased so much in the last 10 years that it has become difficult to save many of the homes,” says Khan, who has married off his sisters outside the island, on the mainland, and plans to send his own children too away for education. “This island is sinking and there is no point clinging on to it.”
Sugata Hazra, professor and the director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, says the erosion started around 50 years ago and in the next 50 years, almost half the island may go under. “Mousuni is an ideal example of slow-onset disaster, where a sizable portion of land is slowly disappearing every year, leaving hundreds homeless. Most of the erosion is not even recorded in the government registers. Mouzas like Baliara and Kusumtala have almost got halved because of the erosion but the government maps have not been reviewed,” says Hazra, who has spent years studying the effects of climate change in the Sunderbans.
