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Climate change and vicious river bank erosion in the post-Farakka Barrage period have blurred the lines between the rich and the poor and are pushing successive generations to grinding poverty along the lower stretches of the mighty Ganga in West Bengal.
The frequent nature of erosion is induced by hydraulic control by the commissioning of the barrage in 1975 and Indo-Bangladesh water sharing treaty of 1977 and 1996, experts say.
And the famed weaver’s colony (taantis) in Shantipur block of West Bengal’s Nadia district along the left bank of Bhagirathi-Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganga, is one glaring example of the cascading effects of international water policies and diplomacy. The town is around 75 km from the state capital Kolkata.
“If you are living along the banks of the Ganga, you have to learn to live with it,” is how Nirmal Biswas of Shantipur likes to think of climate change and river bank erosion along the Ganga.
The 66-year-old is a resident of Gobarchar village in Nadia, over 200 km downstream of Farakka Barrage Project in Bengal’s Murshidabad district.
Nirmal views resilience as a way of life as the nourishing Ganga “pushes” the land inwards.
But what he worries about, like the rest in his village, is that there would be no land left to satiate the hungry river.
Tracing the extent of the wearing away with his fingers, Biswas said the intensity has increased in the last three to four years.
“Simply placing boulders don’t protect our land from erosion and floods which are now frequent,” he said.
Traditionally fishermen and weavers, Gobarchar’s 12,000 residents have had to adapt as the water plays truant with livelihoods.
As the generations extend, families are becoming poorer and poorer.
They are also reluctant to “grab” alternative livelihood options, Islam noted.
Gobarchar’s fishermen’s miseries are compounded by certain “anti-social” practices that snuff out fish in the river, sparing the prawns which fetch a higher price. The advent of power looms has worsened the situation.
What is more worrisome this year is the “historically low inflow” downstream of the Farakka in the Ganga. The barrage was designed to serve the need of preservation and maintenance of Kolkata Port by improving the regime and navigability of the Bhagirathi-Hoogly river system.
Salinity has gone up and a change in livelihood pattern has also emerged in the aftermath of the Farakka project, said Khodaker Azharul Haq, President, Bangladesh Water Partnership.
“It is in India’s interest to also monitor why there is so much low flow in the Farakka itself. Climate change will affect everything in every possible way,” Haq told IANS.
River expert Kalyan Rudra stressed the river needs a “playground” and it should be left for it to “oscillate laterally and spill off the sediment load carried during the monsoon.”
(This article has been published in an arrangement with IANS.)
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