WHEN you live on an island, rapid land erosion can spell doom. It can also mean an irreversible and mind-numbing change in the status of your assets from the time you go to sleep to the time you wake up.

If this sounds stretches the limits of understanding, just watch The Land Within Ripples, a documentary produced by a company called Mass Education Framelines. It was aired on Doordarshan's afternoon transmission in the second week of March.

Ghoramara is an island in the middle of the fat Hooghly river in West Bengal; not long ago, there were two others nearby. One has disappeared without a trace, the other is 90 per cent submerged. A similar fate awaits Ghoramara. The Land is a very graphic account of how its population is coping with merciless land erosion. Ghoramara's area in 1954 was 2,265 ha. By 1992, it had dwindled to 607.5 ha.

The hungry river
The river's maw is gaping wider. The film is one family's experience. It portrays one farmer who had 9.72 ha of land and now has .27 ha, and another who lost his entire 8.1 ha and had to turn into a boatmen for a living. A researcher and activist who provides most of the field observation in the film describes how he stayed overnight in a house which had, in addition to the main room, a cowshed with 8 cows, a kitchen, and 4 coconut trees. The morning after, the river had left no trace of 3 cows, 3 coconut trees and part of the kitchen.

Over 70 per cent of this island is already submerged, and yet the state government does nothing to arrest the river's hunger. Someone in the film says that the central government is supposed to have allocated Rs 80 crore to save the island, but no work had begun at the time that this film was made.

The villagers are bitter about Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's indifference to their plight. One of them asks plaintively why, in this age of problem-solving science, the village can't be saved. The ships traversing the Hooghly seem to only make the problem worse by churning up the river with their wake. At high tide, people shift their children from their houses. The only certainty, however pathetic, in their lives is that this island will never be the future of their children.

Edited and directed by Nilotpal Majumdar, the drawback of this account of the human face of land erosion is that it restricts itself to describing the predicament of the inhabitants of one island. The natural and human-made phenomena that are causing such distress are insufficiently explored. A belated rehabilitation seems to be the only course of action being contemplated. But would land reclamation have been feasible? We are not enlightened. No government officials or technical personnel are interviewed. A single activist holding forth is just not enough to round off what is otherwise a very interesting film.