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<\/div>Tucked away on the eastern coast of India, Mousuni is one of 54 inhabited islands in the Sundarbans, the world\u2019s largest mangrove forest. This small island is flanked by distributaries of the Ganga River, with the Bay of Bengal to the south. The 25,000-odd people who live on Mousuni can only access the mainland by boat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the past 20 years, the island has become one of the fastest-depleting parts<\/a> of the Sundarbans. In three years, three cyclones<\/a> \u2013 Bulbul, Amphan and Yaas \u2013 have eroded land, accelerated saltwater intrusion and destroyed property and livelihoods. Climate change is making such disasters<\/a> more frequent and intense<\/a>. This, coupled with Covid-19 lockdowns, has been devastating for the islanders, who depend on agriculture<\/a> and fisheries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere was so much uncertainty after three consecutive cyclones that we were losing sleep,\u201d says Sunil Deb, Banani\u2019s father. \u201cOn our one acre of land and little pond we used to grow food and rear fish to sell, but Cyclone Yaas in 2021 ruined the standing crop and killed all freshwater fish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deb adds that the consecutive cyclones caused saltwater<\/a> to seep into the family\u2019s farmland, ruining not only the crops but also the land for at least the next five years. In the last few years, he says, local people, whose income primarily comes from the betel leaves they grow and sell, have had no crop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Cyclone Yaas, Deb says, the family of six survived on money sent by their son, who is working as a labourer in Gujarat, but that was \u201cnot enough\u201d. These were the circumstances that drove the decision to get Banani married off early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Mousuni Cooperative School, one of the two secondary schools on the island, the number of dropouts is at an \u201call-time high\u201d, says headmaster Binay Shi. \u201cIn the past two years, 15-20% of children aged 14-18 have dropped out of school,\u201d he says. So far this school year, 100 students out of 1,306 have dropped out; the previous year 151 left. Shi says at least 60% of the pupils who leave school are girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the headmaster, admissions of younger students are increasing, yet \u201cthe overall number [of students] remains the same or drops each year\u201d. Shi says that the number of students \u201cfalls drastically\u201d after ninth grade \u201cas that\u2019s when these boys and girls are sent off to find work or are married off\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Family after family The Third Pole spoke with said that once, their farm could feed an entire village. Now, they said, they are finding it difficult just to feed their own children. They explained that the pressure to have one less plate at the table is forcing many to pull their daughters out of school and push them into marriage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To improve girls\u2019 well-being and help them stay in school for longer, in 2012 the West Bengal government introduced the Kanyashree Prakalpa<\/a> scheme, which provides annual scholarships to unmarried girls aged 13-18. This initially helped to reduce the dropouts, says Shi. But since cyclones Amphan and Yaas, the number of girls still in school and taking up the scholarship has been falling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Government data for 2019-21 shows that West Bengal has the highest rate in India<\/a> of girls marrying at below the legal minimum age. In 2007-08 it had the second-highest rate<\/a>. The data for 2019-21 shows<\/a> that 99% of girls aged 6-10 in West Bengal attend school, which falls to 77% for the 15-17 age group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem affects boys differently \u2013 whose school attendance is even lower than girls\u2019 by age 15-17, at 67%. Every year, at least 2,000 teenage boys and young men leave<\/a> Mousuni in search of work in other Indian states such as Gujarat and Kerala, or even further afield, says Ram Krishna Mandal, deputy chief of the Mousuni gram panchayat (village council).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirty-six-year-old Chanchal Giri from Kusumtala village recently returned to the island to spend some time with his four-year-old son and wife, after eight years working on construction sites in Oman, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. In 2009, Cyclone Aila spoiled his crop and made his land unsuitable for farming for the next few years. Last year, Cyclone Yaas rendered the land unusable again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne by one, all of us four brothers left the island in search of work. We keep visiting as our families still live here, but there are no job prospects for us to stay here long,\u201d says Giri, who is the youngest brother. He says he anticipates a similar future for his son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climate change is having a similar impact on children\u2019s education across the border in inland Bangladesh. According to Nasir Uddin, education officer for the district of Rajshahi, nearly 30% of students (from fifth grade to senior secondary age) have dropped out of school in Rajshahi in the past five years. Among these, the child marriage rate is over 20%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A report<\/a> released this August by Bangladesh\u2019s Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education revealed that in 2021, Rajshahi had the highest rate in the country of girls dropping out of school to get married, at 15.82%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are only two high schools on the 15 climate-vulnerable chars [river islands] in the Padma [river] and about 35-40 girl students of the two schools get married off each year since the char dwellers live in extreme poverty,\u201d says Abdus Sattar, headteacher of Chakrajpur High School in Rajshahi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rajshahi is a hot, drought-prone region. Golam Rabbani, a researcher and head of the Climate Bridge Fund Secretariat at international development organisation BRAC, says that between 1981 and 2020, the city of Rajshahi experienced seven instances of the temperature reaching 38-42 degrees Celsius for 30 days or longer. Three of these were in 2010, 2012 and 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rising temperature itself creates a barrier to girls\u2019 education. Over the last few decades, the average temperature in the Rajshahi region has risen by around one degree Celsius, says Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, a think tank in Dhaka. \u201cGirls traditionally wear many clothes,\u201d he says, even during summer. The discomfort this causes \u201caccelerates their suffering while attending schools, which ultimately forces them to drop out\u201d, says Rahman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there is the indirect impact of rising temperatures. Most people in the district depend on agriculture and are severely impacted by extreme weather. Heatwaves, made more intense and frequent<\/a> by climate change, lead to areas becoming water-stressed<\/a>. Floods, which are also increasing in severity<\/a>, adversely affect crop production<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As families fall into poverty, they look for ways to ease their financial pressures. Rabbani says that this prompts parents to pull their children out of school: girls are married off so there is one less mouth to feed and boys are sent out to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rajshahi has the highest rate of school-age children (19%) involved in child labour in Bangladesh, according to the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education\u2019s August report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 50-year-old Sheikh Abdullah, a resident of Baliara, is one of the many farmers on Mousuni who have lost coastal land. In 2016, a 4.5-hectare chunk of his family\u2019s ancestral land \u2013 the equivalent of about nine football fields \u2013 was claimed in a single event by the sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf it were not for the money sent by my two sons working in Kerala and Kolkata, we would have died of hunger,\u201d says Abdullah, who lives with his wife and two daughters-in-law, who also married young. This year, he tried to grow paddy in the small piece of remaining land, but the brackish water from last year\u2019s cyclone ruined the crop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The island is only three metres above the high-water mark, and is frequently inundated<\/a> with saltwater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between 1968-69 and 2012, 16% of land<\/a> on Mousuni was lost. Over the same period, the Indian Sundarbans shrank by nearly 260 square kilometres, at an average rate of 6 sq km a year. Erosion was most significant in the 10 years from 2001 to 2012: about 90 sq km disappeared at a rate of around 8 sq km per year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sugata Hazra, head of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and an expert on the Sundarbans, says that the sea level at Diamond Harbour on the edge of the Sundarbans is rising by more than 5 millimetres a year. In comparison, more than 2,000 kilometres away on the Kerala coast, annual sea level rise is 1.8 mm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Wooden](\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/20220910_high-tide-Mousuni-island-WestBengal_CheenaKapoor_TheThirdPole.jpg\")
<\/div>Children leave education early in record numbers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>There was so much uncertainty after three consecutive cyclones that we were losing sleep<\/blockquote>Father of a girl who married below the legal minimum age<\/cite><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Similar situation in drought-prone Rajshahi<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
With climate change, vulnerability in the delta will increase<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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