30 years on, Kangsabati shifts course, engulfs homes
The Statesman | 19 July 2025
Where the Kangsabati once nourished fields and sustained generations, it now advances like a predator—gnawing away land, homes, and entire villages in Midnapore Sadar Block.
In the last three decades, the river has redrawn its course, shifting by nearly 0.67 kilometres, and with every passing year, its hunger has only grown fiercer, leaving behind a trail of destruction that maps no recovery.
A recent survey by the Department of Geography at Raja Narendra Lal Khan Women’s College, Midnapore, has provided the first comprehensive glimpse into the scale of devastation stretching along 30 kilometres of the riverbank—from Dherua to Kangsabati. Conducted by twenty postgraduate students combining satellite imagery with direct observation, the study captures what the residents of Dherua, Chandra, Manidaha, and Kangsabati gram panchayats have been living through: relentless erosion that swallows farmland, settlements, and futures.
The field teams documented soil layers, cross-sections, slope inclinations, and vegetation spread, classifying the region into zones of varying risk. At the highest risk are villages such as Bhatpara, Uprodanga, Dhajidhara, Manidaha, Faridchak, Chaipur, Balishira, Tetulia, and Birbira—now mere shadows of their past. Dherua, Durgachati, and Gurguripal occupy the precarious middle ground, while Bhalo Shalika and Berapal survive, for now, in the low-risk category.
Pravat Kumar Shit, the geography professor who steered the survey, did not mince words. “In several places, the banks are sheer drops, rising 5 to 7 metres with slopes as steep as 80 degrees. Beneath, it is clay and sand—fragile, soft, and treacherous. Trees like bamboo can only root themselves 2 to 3 metres deep. Once the river eats into the lower layers, the upper bank hangs precariously before it cracks, collapses, and vanishes. That’s the anatomy of disappearance.”
It is the river’s left bank that suffers the worst, where the concave bends concentrate the fury of the current, battering the earth until it yields. The numbers speak of a silent calamity: Manidaha has lost 8.54 hectares of farmland in just a decade, Dherua 6.17 hectares, while in Dhajidhara village, what was once a community of over 300 homes is now a scattered cluster of barely 60.
Continuous heavy rainfall has worsened the crisis, driving the Kangsabati to dangerously high levels in recent weeks. Low-lying areas like Manidaha are submerged; the banks keep crumbling at Uprodanga, Bhatpara, Faridchak, and others nearby. What the river doesn’t take, the waters drown.
For the families living on these fragile margins, the losses are deeply personal and painfully irreversible. Kalipada Ray, a 60-year-old farmer from Dhajidhara, speaks of devastation counted not in years but in bighas: “The river has eaten 25 bighas of my paddy fields in thirty years. What remains is not enough to live on.”
Avani Bera, 62, from Uprodanga, echoes the despair: “An acre of my farmland is gone. Farming was all I knew. Now, there is neither land nor livelihood.”
As the land recedes, so does the patience of the people. Communities are demanding immediate intervention—an end to rampant, illegal sand mining that weakens riverbanks, and a long-overdue fortification of the embankments with stone boulders driven deep into the earth to arrest the river’s advance.