Book Excerpt: Listen to the land

The Ganga here is democratic in its ravenous appetite. It eats everything–paddy fields, mango orchards, schools, homesteads, factories, bakeries, markets, textile shops, sugarcane fields. Malda has lost over 250 square kilometres of land —more than half the size of Chennai—to the river.

Each of the now-disappeared bighas once employed people, often entire families. The land sustained them. Its loss led to starvation and, inevitably, migration.

Besides agriculture, the only industry in the area is beedimaking, but the income is meagre, insufficient to sustain families of five or eight or twelve. Rolling 1,000 beedis takes two days and fetches one hundred rupees–less than a dollar a day. If the beedis the women make are surplus to demand, there is no payment.

Inamul-bhai and the Mumbai-returned Tarikul, along with a few others, formed a committee in 1995 as a fulcrum for the erosion-affected people. Their demands were simple then, and remain so today: they ask that the government release information on vulnerable areas, acquire such lands, pay the villagers at market rates and rehabilitate them.

They don’t want the government to ‘sanction relief ’, knowing from experience that it will be siphoned off by middlemen and functionaries, those who grow fat on the misfortune of their fellows. More practicable would be safer land, electricity, schools, hospitals, and thereby a life away from the erosion.

The government has, instead, pumped crores into fortifying the banks with boulders to stem erosion. It costs over Rs 1 lakh to protect one metre of riverbank—but the money doesn’t buy a guarantee against erosion, say experts, who point out that the river in spate washes the boulders away along with the land and everything on it. Yet the effort continues; overall, the government has now spent upwards of Rs 13 crore on these futile defences.

‘It is a collusion between the government, which allocates the funds, and the contractors,’ says Tarikul-bhai with the fatalistic smile of one who has seen it all before and is no longer fooled by promises. ‘Often they do 10 per cent of the work and claim compensation for 100 per cent. And they start work in the monsoons, which is stupid. How can you work on fortifying the bank line when the soil is already wet and soft with rain?’ But Tarikul-bhai has not lost all hope and continues to fight for just rehabilitation.

There is little doubt that the government’s ‘anti-erosion schemes’ have been plagued by bad planning, execution, and monitoring at all levels, both state and central. There is consensus among the locals, the experts, the oversight authority, and even the Supreme Court. It is only the government that fails–or perhaps refuses–to acknowledge the obvious.

As I walk through more of these villages in limbo and speak to the anxious denizens, my notebooks overflow with tales of frustration and litanies of despair.

Inamul-bhai is aware of the ground realities. He knows the genesis of this systematic destruction, and has witnessed its repeated occurrences. He understands the dynamics of apathy and its bedfellow, corruption. He explains it all to me like the teacher he is, a gentle smile on his face as he talks.

‘Are you not angry?’ I ask. He laughs. He wipes his face with his hand and picks up a plate that his wife has brought in, laden with savouries, nuts and sweets. ‘How much can this plate hold?’ he says. ‘You can fill it with only so much. After that, there’s nowhere to go. My anger is like that. I could hold only so much. It overflowed, and then it disappeared. I am pushing seventy. After seven losses, I am still standing.

‘I can’t say how much longer it will last,’ he tells me, as we sit on the steps of his home, both of us keenly aware of the river tumbling along its course a mere 500 metres away. ‘The river keeps pushing closer each year. But for now, I have a roof over my head, and for that I am grateful.’

(With permission from Pan Macmillan India)

This was first published in the 16-31 September, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth