The gentle roar of the ocean lulled Indian mother-of-two Banita Behra to sleep each night, until one day the encroaching tide reached her doorstep. Behra is among hundreds of people from the disappearing and largely abandoned coastal village of Satabhaya, whose displaced former residents have been officially recognized by the government as climate migrants. She grew up watching helplessly with her neighbors as rising seas, driven by climate change and upriver dams, slowly claimed the land around them. "We were doing well there. We used to catch fish," the 34-year-old told AFP. "But the sea came nearer and took away our homes." Satabhaya is the hardest-hit of several rural idylls along the seafront in eastern Odisha, a state that has also been battered in recent decades by tropical cyclones and floods of increasing ferocity. Behra's home is now underwater, 400 meters (1,300 feet) out to sea, while a few of her neighbors who refused to move live in makeshift thatched huts by the new shoreline. A weathered brick wall is all that remains of what was once a seaside temple to Panchubarahi - a locally revered Hindu deity supposed to protect worshippers from natural disasters. Last year the Odisha government announced funds for a resettlement colony in Bagapatia, 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) inland from their village, giving each family a small plot of land and $1,800 to build a new house. Authorities said the scheme was the first of its kind in India for those forced to leave their homes by climate change. But life in Bagapatia has been tough for the new arrivals: without seas to fish and farmland to cultivate, many are depressed by having lost their self-reliance and way of life. In order to survive, most of the community's men have had to take jobs to work as laborers out of state. Behra's husband is now away 10 months of the year, working on the opposite side of the country and sending money home to... |