Climate change and vicious river bank erosion in the post-Farakka Barrage period have blurred the lines between the rich and the poor and are pushing successive generations to grinding poverty along the lower stretches of the mighty Ganga in West Bengal.
The frequent nature of erosion is induced by hydraulic control by the commissioning of the barrage in 1975 and Indo-Bangladesh water sharing treaty of 1977 and 1996, experts say.
And the famed weaver’s colony (taantis) in Shantipur block of West Bengal’s Nadia district along the left bank of Bhagirathi-Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganga, is one glaring example of the cascading effects of international water policies and diplomacy. The town is around 75 km from the state capital Kolkata.
“If you are living along the banks of the Ganga, you have to learn to live with it,” is how Nirmal Biswas of Shantipur likes to think of climate change and river bank erosion along the Ganga.
The 66-year-old is a resident of Gobarchar village in Nadia, over 200 km downstream of Farakka Barrage Project in Bengal’s Murshidabad district.
Nirmal views resilience as a way of life as the nourishing Ganga “pushes” the land inwards.
But what he worries about, like the rest in his village, is that there would be no land left to satiate the hungry river.
