Boat People
For the river islands in Brahmaputra, Assam, floods are an annual affair sweeping away lives, making the tribal shift from one island to another. For most of them, the river is the main source of livelihood and the same river during monsoons becomes the main cause of despair. The boat filled with water captures this very irony.
Stayed back after a documentary shoot in 2017 and travelled from one island to another (Rs. 2 per boat ride). In Dayapur met a young boy Nilanjan , who with his friends took me on a boat ride to some interesting Mangroves in Sunderbans. There is a loss of about 110 sq. kms of mangroves in the last two decades here.
Sundarbans acts as a natural coastal barrier saving the forest and inland. They say that with global warming the cyclones will become more frequent. Significance of such natural protection increases exponentially.
Sunderbans, a delta and a cluster of islands has people commuting every day from one island to another for all their needs. Be it daily vegetables, clothes or bricks that they are going to use to build their houses, they have to depend on the these boats that take them from one island to another.
Traditional fishing was the main economic activity of coastal populations in Goa. There was a time when the only structures along the shore were a few cabins and thatched huts made of coconut tree leaves that housed sea going canoes, some of which can still be seen today. The land behind the dune belts was used for farming. Rapid mechanization in fishing and tourism has resulted in shoreline erosion and coastline changes. This encroachment has affected the fish yield each year. Traditional Goan fisherman’s fish production has been reduced to low individual catches within a limited coastal waterline, and a high instability of income.
The Goan fishermen leave well before sunrise in the morning into the ocean for fishing. Against all odds, some of them retain their traditional form of fishing. In this photograph, fishermen are getting their boat to the shore after spending hours at the sea.