In flood-prone Makaltala, erratic monsoons and prolonged waterlogging have left thousands of hectaresof paddy submerged for months.
Farmers, especially women, face severe livelihood losses.
Local innovations like water chestnut cultivation and floating vegetable beds offer temporary relief.
Bridging scientific research with lived realities is critical for long-term resilience.
In the flood-prone lowlands of West Bengal, the fate of farming now entirely depends on the whims of water. The monsoon that historically sustained paddy has turned erratic, with delayed onset and heavy late-season rains, leaving fields submerged for months.
In villages like Makaltala in Habra I block of North 24 parganas, the plots where farmers cultivated Pratiksha, Swarna and Pankaj varieties of paddy until even five years ago, remain buried under four to five feet of stagnant water from June to December.
Nearly 8,400 hectares of agricultural land in Habra I and II blocks are affected by floods and prolonged waterlogging each year, signaling a recurrent regional crisis. Choked canals, silted drains, erratic rainfall and unplanned urban growth have turned once-productive tracts of the Ganga–Padma–Ichhamati basin into shallow wetlands.
No available paddy variety can withstand such long submergence. Traditional crop rotations like jute–fallow–rice and Rabi crops are increasingly becoming unviable. The region’s farming system is collapsing, as vast stretches of land remain underwater for months.
Yet these inland basins seldom figure in Bengal’s climate narrative, which focuses largely on coastal and saline belts, possibly inadvertently shaping research and development priorities. When the fields refuse to drain, older farmers in Makaltala recall when tall deepwater paddy covered these fields. “We had varieties like Jhumpuri. They grew with the water. Back then, the canals flowed, the rivers drained. Water never stayed this long.”
Jhumpuri and Katrangi varieties were part of Bengal’s diverse rice ecology. Jhumpuri thrived in midlands that drained slowly. But water now stagnates for months. Submergence-tolerant varieties like Swarna-Sub1 and IR64-Sub1 survive flooding for only about 14 days.
While innovative breeding strategies like Transition from Trait to Environment offer significant promise for managing long-term stress conditions, moving these scientific gains from laboratory to fields is slow.
Many smallholder farmers under increasing climate pressure cannot afford to wait. The urgency is immense!
As breeders develop new crop varieties that can endure prolonged submergence, farmers need immediate alternatives to sustain food and income. Little attention has been paid by the agricultural research community to understand and respond to the needs of such inland waterlogged areas, leaving farmers to figure out how to adapt to changing climate and ecology.
The collapse of paddy and jute cuts deeper for women farmers. With no land ownership, most earn by transplanting, weeding and harvesting on others’ farms. When paddy and jute fail, they have no work.
Men find construction or transport jobs in nearby towns, but women’s options shrink. They are confined to precarious low-paid domestic work or seasonal migration. The loss of paddy is not just the loss of a crop — it’s the loss of their steady source of cash income.
“If farming is no longer an option for six months, we’ll have to leave the village in search of work,” said Laxmi Sardar, a middle-aged woman farmer. Muddling through the adaptation process Makaltala, a predominantly Scheduled Tribe village, has long remained on the margins, both socially and economically. Since 2023, it has been the locus of a Learning Lab of the CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator, where gender-responsive Sociotechnical Innovation Bundling is being piloted to strengthen the resilience of the most marginalised women.
The entry point was livestock enterprises, an asset women exercise relatively higher control of. Focusing on goats and poultry distributed through government schemes, the initiative sought to improve livelihood and income stability, while building agency.
The next step was to revive the nearly abandoned paddy cultivation. Trials of next-generation flood-tolerant germplasm were initiated to respond to farmers’ needs. While some lines are showing promise, they will require multi-season and multi-location testing. This meant the farmers needed an immediate alternative.
Supported by the Ramkrishna Mission Vivekananda Education and Research Institute (RKMVERI) and a former professor of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Vishwavidyalay, some farmers started experimenting with water chestnut (Trapa natans), a crop that thrives in stagnant or semi-stagnant water.
Dulal Sardar demonstrated the crop on two kathas (around 0.05 hectare) of his waterlogged land and harvested eight kilogrammes of water chestnuts this season, each about 3-4 centimetres in diameter. “We always knew about water chestnuts,” Dulal said. “But we never thought of growing them in our own fields.”
This small experiment sparked curiosity among nearly twenty neighbouring families, who would like to try it next season. It offered a glimpse of what adaptation could look like — not a full solution, but a reprieve; a way to stay rooted to the land while the future of paddy takes shape.
However, as the monsoon stretches longer and pre-winter cyclones become more frequent, the question of “what next” looms large. Should farmers continue with water chestnut? Will it meet their food and income needs? Can they return to paddy, or shift to other aquatic crops — or must they leave farming altogether?
To make informed decisions, farmers need an understanding of how water moves and its implications for their farming. RKMVERI guided setting up of a low-cost community-based water monitoring system in Makaltala.
Ten bamboo poles (seven feet high) were installed in key plots to record weekly water levels. Data collected between late September and October by farmers, under researcher supervision, showed standing water exceeding 3.5 feet in most plots.
Waterlogging persisted when the monsoon should have been receding. Soil analyses revealed significant degradation. Prolonged submergence has compacted soil, reduced aeration and suppressed microbial activity — eroding fertility and disrupting nutrient cycling.
As a result, once productive fields are slipping into a state of biological exhaustion, diminishing both yields and the land’s ability to recover.
Much of West Bengal’s climate adaptation has centred around the Sundarbans — with saltwater intrusion and erosion dominating the narrative. The region features prominently in the state’s action plan, with dedicated institutions and numerous international projects.
This singular gaze often overlooks inland ecologies, with prolonged flooding and stagnation. As Camelia Dewan observed, “climate change” often becomes a rhetorical ‘spice’ that makes development projects more palatable to funders while sidelining local realities.
Regions like the Sundarbans risk becoming symbolic showcases of climate vulnerability, drawing disproportionate attention and resources while other equally affected landscapes remain invisible. In this process, areas like Makaltala — equally affected but less visible — slip through the cracks.
Perhaps this explains why investments in West Bengal and neighbouring deltaic regions have mainly focused on developing and promoting salinity-tolerant rice varieties. The challenge of prolonged submergence has remained invisible.
Meanwhile, farmers continue to innovate. Before water chestnut, some experimented with floating vegetable beds on banana-trunks, inspired by traditional methods from Bangladesh. “We were shown videos of how they do it in Bangladesh by Kutub da (the local NGO representative),” recalled Aparna Sardar. “We said, why not try it? We are trying to change with the landscape. We can’t let the water decide everything,” said Anuradha Chatterjee, general secretary of SEVA, who has worked with these farmers for over three decades and has been leading implementation of the Learning Lab.
These small experiments, while modest, signal a quiet substantive shift from waiting for solutions to be passed down from research stations to creating them in their farms, one step at a time.
Many of these experiments were initiated or maintained by women. They combined household materials, kitchen waste and crop residues to make floating beds.
Their improvisations blurred the line between “farm work” and “domestic work”, showing how adaptation is often sustained through feminised, unpaid labor. And this rarely enters accounts of formal innovation.
The story of Makaltala is not just about one village — it’s about the limits of how we imagine adaptation. Climate is no longer following predictable rules and farmers are confronting stresses that science hasn’t yet mapped.
In Makaltala, adaptation is both a necessity and an experiment. Each flooded plot, floating bed is a form of inquiry that may be imperfect and improvised, but deeply empirical. These are not rejections of science, but reminders of where science must look next.
What’s needed is a bridge between formal science-generated knowledge and lived experience allowing them to learn from one another, and farmers’ insights and needs shape the research priorities.
Ultimately, the true test of innovation lies not in scientific promise, but in delivering resilient, practical solutions that reach those who need them most before time runs out.
This article draws in part on data from a forthcoming project report of IRRI and RKMVERI for the CGIAR GEI Accelerator.
Prama Mukhopadhyay and Ranjitha Puskur are with the International Rice Research Institute, India. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.