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The islands that were erased

This article was first published by me in the Times of India on May 27, 2026. You can read the original here . The engineers who drew up a river-training scheme for the lower Hooghly in 1981 — to keep the approach to Haldia port navigable for large cargo vessels — knew that part of their plan would intensify erosion along the shores of three islands downstream — two of them inhabited. So they included a protective wall for those islands as the final component of the scheme. That wall was never built. And two of those islands are now gone. The 1991 Census of India recorded 374 people living on Lohachara Island in the Hooghly estuary. Six years later, they had all left, their homes overtaken by water that would not stop rising. By 2006, Lohachara had disappeared. A second island in the same cluster, Bedford, was uninhabited. It too has gone. A third, Ghoramara — whose population ran into the thousands in successive censuses — has lost more than half its land area over the past few decad...
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Lohachara Lost And Found

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[ For the first-timers: As the name suggests, this blog is about islands of the world heritage site of the Sunderbans -- a vast archipelago in the eastern India -- which are gradually getting wiped out because of certain geomorphological reasons. A section of media, however, has been highlighting the issue as a fallout of global warming and sea level rise. But there hasn't been any significant study to prove that. If we want to save the islands, we have to try and find out the real reasons behind the disappearance of these islands. In our first post, we had written about some experts' views on the issue. In the present post, we will visit an emerging island in the Hooghly estuary which, according to the media, had been permanently inundated by the rising sea waters.] In the early 1970's, there was an island in the western Sunderbans (India) called Kakdwip Char. It was on the river called Muriganga, between Kakdwip and Sagar island. The small island was an uninhabited one, ...
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A Global Warming Hoax

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Let us save the islands of the world heritage zone of the Sunderbans. Let us try to find out the real reasons why some of the islands of this archipelago are eroding away. According to official records, there are 102 islands in the Indian Sunderbans. But of them, at least two have already disappeared (one is rising from the waters again, though) and a dozen-odd are likely to vanish in the next two to three decades if no action is taken immediately. The Sunderbans houses the world's largest mangrove forests which are a natural habitat of Bengal tiger and many other wildlife unique to this area. This region may fall prey to the climate change, but the islands which have vanished are not really global warming victims, say scientists and engineers WHO HAVE WORKED IN THE REGION for years. There has been very little study on the effect of global warming on the Sunderbans. But... Global Warming Sells That is why Lohachara, a small island in the western Sunderbans in India, becomes the fi...
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