Ghoramara Island is an island 92 km south of

Kolkata Kolkata, also known as Calcutta ( its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River, west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

in the

Sundarban Sundarbans (; pronounced ) is a mangrove forest area in the Ganges Delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers in the Bay of Bengal. It spans the area from the Hooghly River in India's state of West Bengal to t ...

Delta complex of the

Bay of Bengal The Bay of Bengal is the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean. Geographically it is positioned between the Indian subcontinent and the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese peninsula, located below the Bengal region. Many South Asian and Southe ...

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

sea level rise The sea level has been rising from the end of the last ice age, which was around 20,000 years ago. Between 1901 and 2018, the average sea level rose by , with an increase of per year since the 1970s. This was faster than the sea level had e ...

Shrinking of island

The island has been said to be shrinking. A 2007 study by

Jadavpur University Jadavpur University ( abbr. JU) is a public state funded research university with its main campus located at Jadavpur, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It was established on 25 July in 1906 as ''Bengal Technical Institute'' and was converted into ...

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 Islands of India Populated places in India Islands of the Bay of Bengal

Shrinking of island

Population

See also

References