malda-pic

River of Sorrows

Date

24/02/26

"Ever since 1971," Mosarekul Anwar told me on our walk in Panchanandapur, "75 maujas (administrative land units) of Malda district from Farakka to 40 kilometres upstream have been heavily eroded, and the width of the original river has changed by 5 kilometres in some places, 7 kilometres, 10 kilometres, and even 16 kilometres by prolonged erosion. Almost 1,00,000 people have lost their houses, shelters, and land in the hands of Ganga erosion. Now they are homeless, hopeless." Anwar, a member of the Ganga Bhangan Action Prevention Citizen's Committee, foretold the story of suffering faced by the same river that flows across my house in North Kolkata.

This geomorphic catastrophe, which has destroyed Malda and Murshidabad over five decades, carries a colonial institutional lineage traceable to the Farakka Barrage. As December 2026 approaches, with the thirty-year Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty set to expire, affected communities face a second, simultaneous erasure: the deletion of 91 lakh names from electoral rolls under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The barrage was first proposed by British engineer Sir Arthur Cotton in 1853 to preserve Calcutta port’s navigability. Inaugurated by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, the structure was designed to divert 40,000 cusecs into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly river system. By blocking 500 to 800 million tonnes of annual sediment, the barrage triggered a raised-bed effect. This dramatically amplified lateral erosive pressure, causing the riverbank to retreat by over 16 kilometres in reaches like Manikchak. Nearly 2,800 hectares of fertile land have been lost, with property damage estimated at Rs. 1,000 crores. The scale of deprivation on these chars is severe: in one year, 13 pregnant women died in Malda chars due to lack of medical access. This physical precarity now mirrors a documentary one. The 2025-2026 SIR required voters to prove "legacy linkage" to the 2002 rolls, resulting in the removal of 91 lakh names. Data indicates that 63.4 per cent of those deleted were Hindus and 34.3 per cent were Muslims, suggesting the exercise penalised anyone lacking stable intergenerational records. Sarda Choudhury, a char resident, noted the bureaucratic impossibility: "I can't find my Aadhar card. Officials demand 4000 rupees to make a new one.” Within the context of the Anthropocene, these ever-shifting fluvial landscapes are not static landforms but emergent products of the complex interplay between riverine systems and anthropogenic interventions. They represent what Paul Zucker terms an "aesthetic hybrid" of ruins: testaments to the passage of time where the beauty emerging from decay offers a richer, albeit tragic, understanding of the evolving world. In Malda, the ruins of mosques and homes hanging from undercut embankments stand as markers of a lived reality where historical colonial legacies and political mismanagement collide.

While the Union Government historically managed riverbank protection across 120 kilometres, it unilaterally reduced the Farakka Barrage Project Authority’s (FBPA) jurisdiction to just 19.4 kilometres in 2017. This shifted the financial burden to West Bengal, which has since spent Rs. 168.47 crores on vulnerable stretches. Meanwhile, displaced populations have migrated to "chars," transient river islands where they exist as environmental refugees. The Institute of Development Studies Kolkata describes their life through the acronym SDRR: Settlement, Displacement, Re-settlement, and Re-displacement. Many residents have relocated up to sixteen times in fifteen years.

The 1996 treaty governing these waters expires on December 12, 2026. Current negotiations are complicated by the firmer stance of Dhaka’s interim government and the domestic requirements of West Bengal and Bihar. For char dwellers, the treaty is a land-use policy determining the very existence of these "contested spaces." As Tarikul Islam of the Ganga Bhangan Action Prevention Committee argues, any renewal must include a permanent scientific solution to erosion and formal citizenship rights for the 3 lakh people living in no man’s land. Without integrating ecological flow guarantees and rehabilitation frameworks, the treaty will continue to govern a geography of displacement that no administrative category can adequately name.
Watch The Teaser

Themes

  • River Ecology
  • Migration
  • Climate Justice