Kolkata: For 20 days after cyclone Aila hit his village in the Sunderbans in May 2009, Prashanta Singha and his family of ten took refuge in the local high school, waiting for the waters to recede. The cyclone had submerged a greater part of the K-Plot area in Achintanagar panchayat, under the Pathar Pratima block in Sunderbans.
“We were at a loss. Not only were our crops destroyed, the sea water had entered our fields and refused to recede for at least 10 days. When it finally did, the soil was so saline that it was impossible to cultivate anything,” says the 24-year-old Singha, who is from a family of farmers and owns 4.5 bighas of cultivable land.
Word went out, reportedly even from the block-level government authorities, that the land couldn’t be cultivated for at least three years. They had an unhappy precedent too. “In 1981-82, a similar flood had left the land so saline that it couldn’t be cultivated for two years,” says Susanta Giri, who is associated with a local club, the Baikunthapur Tarun Sangha (BTS).
It was then that BTS, along with NGOs like