Gone with the Tide

Cyclone Aila brought devastation to the Sundarbans. The state government’s neglect has worsened people’s woes beyond easy description

CYCLONE AILA has wrecked the Sundarbans. But its distressed residents wish it were a tsunami that hit their islands. Then, they’d all have died and escaped the hardships they’re now subject to. The furious lashing of water brought by the cyclone, the fiercest to hit this watery archipelago in over 50 years, wreaked such devastation that it’s a wonder anyone still has the will to survive.

Among the first to succumb were the weak mud embankments that protect the 52 inhabited islands of the Sundarbans. As saline water rushed in, village after village was swept away, rendering some 2.5 million of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the islands homeless. The 3,500 km embankment ring was designed as a flank against high tides (when sea water rises above ground level), not against such a torrential attack. Worse, they were not even reinforced. The neglect has proved fatal, defenceless as the people were left in the face of Aila’s ferocity. In all, more than 230 km of embankment has vanished. Of what remains, there are wide breaches in more than 500 places.

With repairs progressing at snail’s pace, thanks to faulty state policy, bungling and administrative ineptitude, there’s every chance of the islands going completely underwater, come bhora kotal (fortnightly high tide during ‘no moon’ and ‘full moon’) later this week. And then, whatever is left of the Sundarbans will disappear forever.

It’s tragic. An entire week after Aila struck, thousands of people are still marooned with little food and water. Relief, in the rudimentary form of packets of puffed rice, jaggery and water pouches, is still to reach the interiors of the islands. Even what is reaching the accessible villages on the periphery of the area is grossly inadequate. Till just the other day, a cruise down the now placid rivers that separate the islands in the mouth of the Bay of Bengal was a major tourist draw. Today, it makes for a heart-rending experience—hapless people huddle atop fragile embankments (many islands’ only dry ground now), with nothing over their heads, letting out plaintive cries for water and food. They wail at every passing vessel. Most pass by, having little to offer.

Rotting carcasses of cattle line the embankments. We step off our hired launch at Jamespur in Satjelia island, and clamber up the remnants of a breached embankment, taking care to avoid stepping on the bloated body of a goat. An overwhelming stench assaults us, along with a surreal scene of complete devastation. Not a house is left standing. Putrid water, with animals rotting amid hay and vegetation, is everywhere. “The water is not draining out because this breach in the embankment is letting in saline water during every diurnal high tide,” says Girindra Nath Mridha, who was our guide when we last visited the Sundarbans a couple of months ago. Mridha lost the 400 kg of rice he had stocked for his family of ten for the entire year. He has lost most of his belongings—his house has collapsed, and he now spends the nights with his family in what was once his cowshed, sharing space with his three cows and a dozen hens and ducks. “But I’m lucky,” he says, “there are many in the interiors who don’t have anything at all.”

Mridha tells us about Anandapur village, an hour away from Jamespur on the same island, where a dozen odd families have spent the entire past week on the thatched roofs of their collapsed houses. “The village is still under eight feet of water,” he says, “and they’re living only on puffed rice and some pouches of water.”

There are thousands stranded in such villages, and no one knows their plight. Indian Air Force helicopters airdropped food packets for two days last week, but after the photo-op, this relief effort was inexplicably withdrawn by the state government. If Aila wrecked the Sundarbans last week, the Left Front government’s apathy has left the people with little hope for survival.

Take the case of relief: it is not that materials aren’t pouring in. A few score trucks loaded with foodstuff, tarpaulin sheets, bleaching powder, utensils and clothes can indeed be sighted. But they lie idle, waiting to be unloaded at Gadkhali jetty, an entry port to the Sundarbans. A dozen odd labourers unload the materials at a leisurely pace and dump the sacks onto waiting vessels, while a couple of bored clerks make entries in dog-eared registers. The materials are then ferried across the Bidyadhari river to the jetty at Gosaba, which is the block administrative headquarters, unloaded, and taken to the block office godown for another round of entries before being taken back to the same jetty to be reloaded on vessels and finally dispatched to needy villages.

This whole process takes an entire day. It hasn’t occurred to anyone to cut out all this red tape and dispatch the materials directly from the Gadkhali jetty, forget engaging more hands to get the work done fast enough to save lives.

Then, there’s the Army. The state requisitioned the forces’ services, but sent the soldiers back to their barracks after a precious two days. “We could have provided invaluable help in distributing relief, since we have a lot of expertise in this,” says a senior officer at the Army’s Eastern Command, “The Army could also have finished repairing and rebuilding the embankments by now.” But alas, politics came in the way. The Trinamool party chief Mamata Banerjee had already claimed she got the Army deployed within the first few hours, and the Left was not about to let her hog the credit—or let the Army show how ineffective the state’s own relief apparatus is.

The most debilitating deficiency, however, has been infrastructural. When the Left came to power 32 years ago, it abolished the prevalent system of awarding annual contracts for embankment reinforcement, accusing private contractors of cheating the state through inflated bills. Over time, as these earthen structures weakened, all the state had to offer were patchwork repairs. Here too, with contractors left unpaid for years on end, the neglect has been appalling.

No one in Writers Building seems to care. The state finance minister pleads ignorance of the extent of damage; the Sundarbans affairs minister blithely says the people here know how to survive; and the irrigation minister claims that the impossible task of rebuilding all embankments would be completed before the weekend.

This is ‘the weirdest place in the world’, as Open recently described it (29 May issue). But not as weird as the state government’s attitude. Maybe it saw in Aila an instrument sent from above to do what it has been trying for so long—to dissolve the Sundarbans.

About The Author

Jaideep Mazumdar