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November 2016

INDIAN WOMEN DOCUMENT THEIR  STRUGGLE WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

As rising seas swallow islands, turn farmlands fallow, everyday life becomes a challenge.

By Anuradha Sengupta

            A UNESCO World Heritage site, the low-lying Sunderbans delta region by the Bay of Bengal is one of the most visible victims of the ravages of climate change in India.

            An archipelago of several hundred islands of varying size, the Sunderbans stretches nearly 186 miles the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh. It is part of the world’s largest delta (30,888. sq miles) system formed from sediments deposited by three rivers – the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna – as they empty into the Bay of Bengal. It is also home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests.

            The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change had warned nearly a decade ago that areas like the Sunderbans would among the first to bear the brunt of climate risks caused by sea level rise and salt-water intrusion into farmlands and underground aquifers.

            Sea levels in this area are rising at twice the global average, submerging islands, destroying homes and livelihoods. Women and children are especially at risk. Loss of farmable land, rising salinity in soil and groundwater, has led to men migrating in search of work. As a result, the workload on women has increased – they have to tend the fields, run the household and care for family members. This often limits their mobility and increases their vulnerability to factors like sudden weather-related natural disasters. 

            A unique project has enabled the women in the Sunderbans to put together their stories about living with climate change in a vulnerable region. The women documented their lives as a part of a participatory research project that taught them how to wield cameras.

            The project, funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) last year, sought to understand how marginalized groups navigate health services in the Sunderbans and their coping mechanisms. A major issue in the region is access to healthcare. There are no hospitals or doctors on most of the delta islands and getting to the nearest clinic means long, often risky journeys over flooded fields, roads and rivers.

            “Public health access has been weak in this area,” says Professor Barun Kanjilal of the Indian Institute of Health Management Research (IIHMR), which implemented the project for DFID. “Primary health centres have no doctors or medicines. The first contact for most people is the rural medical practitioner.”

            Under the project, 80 women from three blocks of the Indian Sunderbans used PhotoVoice, a participatory action research method, to tell their stories. The women – who were selected from varied educational and livelihood strata – were guided through the process, starting with how to operate a camera. Most of them  had never held one before. They were asked to take photographs of factors that determined their children’s health. The average age of the women was 35, with children in the infant to 6 years range.

            The images shot by the women illustrate problems they face regarding shelter, malnutrition, sanitation and climate change. The accompanying texts deepen the poignancy. Take, for instance, the caption to a photo taken by Bandana Bera that shows an old man being carried in a makeshift carrier fashioned out of a fishing net. “There are simply no roads in this part of the village. To transport ailing people, pregnant mothers, sick children, old and infirm, we use an improvised version of the duli (makeshift palanquin) to get them to the nearby health facility or service provider. At night, we generally do not risk the travel,” it says.

            Barnali Giri, a mother of two, shot an image of her daughter of about five holding her younger infant in her arms. “I leave my younger child with the older one. I know it is very risky, but we have to sustain [ourselves],” the caption to her photo reads.

            An image of a teenage mother with an underweight child taken by Supriya Halder, points to the issue of malnutrition in the Sunderbans – girls gett married off young so there are fewer mouths to feed.

            “We left fully charged cameras with them for 15 days,” says Shibaji Bose,  principal investigator of the project. “There were 8 to 10 women from each village. We told them to shoot factors they feel affects their children’s health. They came up with the social determinants.”

            The IIHMR team made periodic trips to show the women the images they had clicked.

            They had to stop the project due to seasonal floods when the women would have lost their homes, and had to rebuild. “They persevered through it all, saying don’t worry we will continue in the winters,” says Bose.

            “These people have so much resilience – living through cyclones, floods, disease, poverty,” says Kanjilal. “Through the project, we wanted to figure out how to improve their resiliency.”

            The photos were shown to local policy makers last year. Since then they have had three gram panchayat (local governance) level meetings, and a state level one – where the women have presented their work to ministers, academicians, bureaucrats, and CSOs. An immediate effect was that the muddy, unpaved road clicked by one of the women was paved.

            Women in Sunderbans are largely invisible in the media in terms of the way they are coping as well as in the problems they are facing. The project has, helped build a rapport between the women and local authorities – they have a voice now. “The key impact of the project till now has been the creation of an enabling environment to generate discussion on health system issues,” says Kanjilal, “particularly the health of children.” 

            The women say feel they have a sense of empowerment now. They have formed a collective, and are leading the voice of the community to decision makers. – Third World Network Features.

-ends-

The above article is reproduced from Earth Island Journal, 11 November 2016.


When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. And if reproduced on the internet, please send the web link where the article appears to twn@twnetwork.org.

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