PTI
Gosaba (Sundarbans)
Even in knee-deep murky waters, Rina Sarkar is nimble on her feet as she navigates the slippery mudbanks of Chargheri village on Satjalia island in the Sunderbans. She is one of the 150 local women who have come to the embankment, walking through a dense forest, to plant 2,000 mangrove saplings as part of a green initiative.
Rina, like several of her companions, is a “tiger widow” — a local woman whose husband has been taken by the Bengal tiger.
“In 2022, my husband Sudipto Sarkar went to catch fish and crabs, and never returned. He was killed by a tiger,” Rina says as her voice trails off.
According to locals, there are thousands of tiger widows in the expansive Sunderbans region — their lives riddled with social ostracisation, financial instability, and psychological distress. The situation has been exacerbated in recent years, amid rising instances of human-tiger conflict, primarily due to the adverse effects of climate change. While there are legal provisions to provide compensation for wildlife-related fatalities, and several non-government organisations (NGOs) and community-based initiatives to help tiger widows, these women continue to face challenges.
Debaroti Das, who works with Purbasha Eco Helpline Society (PEHS), a Sunderbans-based NGO, says, “Human beings have three basic needs for survival: food, clothes, and shelter. In the Sunderbans, however, there are not many sources of income; here, attaining a quality life is near impossible. Even if people somehow manage to build a house, frequent cyclones that hit the region destroy them.”
In recent years, the Sundarbans — the world’s largest mangrove forest, where around 4.5 million people live — has been a hotbed of climate change, facing an existential threat from rising sea levels, frequent and intense cyclones, and increasing salinity in water. These have also led to an increase in the frequency of human-tiger conflicts, according to experts.
