Shared struggles

Sohail, Firoza, Ruma and Mizanur of Gaibandha district in Bangladesh and Tapan, Pinky, Naseem and Rocky of Malda district in West Bengal have several things in common, including their language and heritage. The teenagers on both sides of the border are equally victims of shifting rivers and chars — the landmass that forms in the middle of a river or along its convex banks. Known as river point bar in geomorphology, a char is created or eroded as the river changes course. As newly formed chars offer new areas for settlement and cultivation, the erosion and flooding of existing chars lead to the displacement and devastation of multitudes along the banks.

Children living on chars in both countries have produced a short film, Fables of Ganga Jamuna , with the help of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), that tells the story of their precarious existence as seen through their young eyes.

What is today’s Pepulia char in the Jamuna river in Gaibandha district of Bangladesh was once the location of a thriving river-port, Fulchory Ghat, connected by a railway network. Over the years, the river receded and took with it the livelihood of a large number of people. Without the river, there is no longer a Fulchory ghat or any of the river services ferrying people and cargo. One can see boats rotting on a sandy surface that was once the bank of a mighty river; the railway station has been abandoned, and the once-thriving eating places along the river bank have disappeared.

Firoza narrates the travails of life in Gobindi char in Bangladesh. The receding Jamuna has snatched away many joys of her life: diving into the flowing waters any time of the day, the smell of fertile land, the swaying of golden-yellow corn, and the colours of fairs and festivals after the harvest is done. “The absence of water has pushed us to the brink,” she says.

Tapan’s family watched helplessly as their home and those of others on Purba Paranpur char in Malda district, West Bengal, were sucked into the river by erosion. They shifted to Hamidpur char , surrounded by rivers on all sides, only to face more challenges, both man-made and natural.

Some chars are home to lakhs of people but bereft of basic amenities. Malda char , for instance, is all of 390sqkm and inhabited by an estimated two lakh, who have no access to clean drinking water, roads, or medical or basic educational facilities allegedly due to “political reasons”.

Paradoxically, however, even where help is at hand, life on the chars remains dangerously unpredictable. Thanks to the Jharkhand government, the people living on Jharkhand char in the Ganga river, in West Bengal today, have roads, pucca houses, banks, schools and a bridge over the Bahudubi river. Yet they keep their fingers crossed. A flood or two, and an erosion can wash away all of it.

The Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna are the largest among the 56 river systems shared by India and Bangladesh. Together these three major rivers drain an area of about 1.75 million sqkm and directly impact the livelihood of more than 600 million people. Cross-border cooperation is, therefore, imperative to meet the growing water needs of the region. IUCN’s four-year project Ecosystems for Life focuses on several critical themes, including food security, water productivity, poverty, climate change, trans-boundary inland navigation, environmental security and biodiversity conservation. Each of them is intricately linked to water management both at the national and trans-boundary levels.

The 20-minute film Fables of Ganga Jamuna was recently screened for the first time in Kolkata, leaving the select audience impressed. It is difficult to believe that the children of the chars in both countries who shot the film were handling video cameras for the first time in their lives. Prior to shooting, they attended workshops held simultaneously in Malda and Gaibandha. The children used Skype to exchange notes across the border and share their experiences of living in chars .

Postscript: A few of the children involved in the film’s making were present at the screening to share their experience. All of them happened to be from the chars in West Bengal, Sadly, their counterparts in Bangladesh could not be reached, even through Skype. The floods have displaced them again.

Santanu Sanya is a Kolkata-based writer

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