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...