By NNN-PTI,
Sunderbans, India : Kabita Patra and her family members at Madanganj village in Namkhana island of the Sunderbans in West Bengal state every night go to sleep with lurking fears of getting drowned if the dykes ringing the islands get breached during high tide.
Due to global warming and consequent sea level rise all human-inhabited islands in Sunderbans, the largest deltaic region in the world, face the threat of getting submerged if the dykes are breached during high tide.
“The dykes were constructed a century ago to settle people and prevent islands from getting submerged. Now the waters rise above the dykes and innundate islands during high tide, which happens twice a day,” Badal Mallick, aged 65, an island dweller says recently.
In August, September and November, the swelling rivers fed by monsoon rain, strong winds and rising sea level led to water overflowing the dykes of 54 human-inhabited islands of Sunderbans flooding. The floods caused damage to the standing paddy crops, releasing fish from the ponds, flattening mud houses, killing livestock and making the farmland saline by sea water.
Ocean scientists say rising sea level caused by global warming has already submerged Lohachara island and Suparibhanga or Bedford island and many more are shrinking as the rising water breaches the dykes and another dyke is built inside the previous, thus losing a part of the island.
“We’ve grown up seeing tides and ebbs in the rivers but now rivers rise much above the usual level and nibble at the bottom of the dykes to breach them,” Kabita Patra says.