As India’s Ghoramara island shrinks, so do residents’ hope for the future
- The island has been eroding for decades due in part to climate change, and is expected to vanish by 2050
- Covid-19 and Cyclone Amphan have worsened the fates of the island’s last 3,000 residents, who have nowhere to go
Gaur Hari Parua, a farmer on the tiny Indian island of Ghoramara, remembers the days when the northern parts of the land stretched as far as the eye could see.
“There were houses, open fields and stretches of farmlands,” said Parua, who has lived on the island in the Sundarban delta region for the past 40 years. “It all disappeared one by one.”
With an area of about 5 square kilometres, Ghoramara is only a fraction larger than New York’s Central Park. Massive erosion driven by rising sea levels has caused the land to shrink by three-quarters of its original size since the 1960s, according to figures by a UN agency, and poor infrastructure in recent decades has compounded those effects.
The island is expected to vanish completely in a few decades, forcing out the 3,000 people who continue to call Ghoramara home, long after almost 40,000 others have fled.
Due to climate change, waters of the Bay of Bengal have been rising up to twice as fast as the global average at about 4.4 to 6.3 millimetres a year, a 2018 study by climate physicist Chirag Dhara showed.
Already, four islands in the region – Bedford, Lohachara, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga – have disappeared over the past three decades, the WWF said in a 2008 report.
The island ... is witnessing a continuous exodus of people as lives and livelihoods are under peril
Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University’s School of Oceanographic Studies, said Ghoramara may be gone by 2050.
