Ghoramara Island is an island 92 km south of

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

in the

Sundarban Sundarbans (pronounced ) is a mangrove area in the delta formed by the confluence of the Padma, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal. It spans the area from the Baleswar River in Bangladesh's division of Khulna to the Hooghly Ri ...

Delta complex of the

Bay of Bengal The Bay of Bengal is the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean, bounded on the west and northwest by India, on the north by Bangladesh, and on the east by Myanmar and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India. Its southern limit is a line between ...

. The island is small, roughly five square kilometers in area, and is quickly disappearing due to erosion and

sea level rise Globally, sea levels are rising due to human-caused climate change. Between 1901 and 2018, the globally averaged sea level rose by , or 1–2 mm per year on average.IPCC, 2019Summary for Policymakers InIPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cry ...

Shrinking of island

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has caused the rivers that pour down from the

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and empty into the Bay of Bengal to swell and shift in recent decades, placing these islands, known as the Sundarbans, in danger. Four islands are completely underwater, and another 10 in the area are at risk. A 2007 study by

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concluded that roughly of the Sundarbans had disappeared during the preceding 30 years, and that Ghoramara had shrunk to less than , about half its size in 1969: this loss of land had caused the displacement of more than 600 families.

Population

Ghoramara island once had a population of 40,000. The 2001 Government of India census showed a population of 5,000 on Ghoramara; this population is believed to have shrunk as families are displaced by the island's sinking and many families are migrating in search of better livelihood. As of 2016 the island has 3,000 residents.

References

Satellite view from Google images International Herald Tribune article
*''Morphological changes of Ghoramara Island: a documentation.'' Indian Journal of Geography and Environment. Vol.2, p. 64-65, 1997. *''Destruction and Agony in Ghoramara Island.'' Paper accepted to present in the 22nd Conference of Institute of Indian Geographers (IIG) and IGU Commission meeting on Land Degradation and Desertification, January 9-1, 2001. {{coord, 21.914, 88.129, display=title, region:IN_type:isle Islands of West Bengal Geography of South 24 Parganas district Sundarbans

Shrinking of island

Population

See also

References