Light in Heart of Darkness

A neglected village is trying to become a model of economic and environmental sustainability

PICTURE SPEAK

SHOWING THE WAY: Banerjee with students of School of Hope

What it does have now though is the School of Hope, the first pucca structure constructed in April this year. An initiative of the World Wildlife Fund (wwf), the School of Hope has over 600 students who have been provided school uniforms and books. The school is helping the villagers in ways beyond educating its children. As there is no electricity at home, the building is lit by solar-powered bulbs so the children can study in the compound. What the electricity has also done is go some distance in the possibility of encounters between the villagers and the other resident of the Sunderbans—the magnificent Royal Bengal Tiger. Known for its frequent intrusions earlier, it has not been sighted near the village for the past five years thanks to wwf intervention.The brightly-lit school is another step in the wwf’s multi-pronged approach to securing environment for man and beast. “People here either depend on wood smuggling or prawn seed collection for livelihood. The first encroaches into tiger territory while the second completely disrupts the ecological balance of the area, because the salinity of the waters is affected due to excessive prawn seed poaching,” says Kakoli Banerjee, assistant coordinator of the Sunderbans landscaping project, wwf. Villagers have lost limbs and lives to shark and crocodile attacks when venturing into deep waters.

WWF has also provided the village with tillers which have increased crop production area from 10 to 20 acres, solar-powered spice grinding machines, deep tube wells and medicinal plant gardens for sustenance. Children here have now formed nature clubs—over 14 of them have been formed in two years—instead of going to the forest to pick wood. It is now the children who teach the parent the importance of saving the tiger. To save the environment, you have to understand it first, like Chhoto Mollakhali seems to have done.

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