If you Google Iswaripur, a village of around 300-households in the Namkhana Block of South 24 Paraganas[1], you will find descriptions and images of a a small, peaceful village, known for its “tranquil local community, fishing culture and proximity to the coast of West Bengal” nestled along the Saptamukhi[2] river.
The Sunderbans, with its dense mangroves remarkable bioodiversity and fragile ecosystem is is the world’s largest delta . It is also one of the most climate vulnerable zones in India, inhabited by millions of people. While it is widely known as a tourist destination, we drove down from Kolkata to learn about the resilience and hardship of communities who live here. Their daily journey, from a mud house to a flooded field, is not a story of adversity to observe from a distance. It is a matter of survival, every day.
When we met Bashibi*, a woman with a remarkable zest for life and her bold female companions, they walked us through the quiet lanes of Iswaripur. We were not prepared for what they told us. With no proper roads, fragile mud houses, barely any electricity and almost no access to clean drinking water, Bashibi and her neighbours have lived through repeated cyclones, tidal surges and flooding.
In 2024, after a severe tidal surge triggered by a storm, Bashibi climbed a tree with her young nephew and remained there for fifteen days. A snake had taken shelter on a branch above them. Despite the fear, they stayed. There was nowhere else to go.
Today, Bashibi stands next to that tree and tells the story with real pride, the kind that comes from having survived something that could have broken you. But the pride does not erase the uncertainty. The embankment at the edge of Iswaripur is eroding. The tidal surge will come again. When it does, the options will be the same: the trees, each other, and whatever they can carry.
River embankment erosion is one of the most urgent and least addressed threats across the Sunderbans, requiring infrastructure investment and government attention that has unfortunately not arrived. We found ourselves suggesting to Rupantaran that they explore partnerships with organisations working specifically on this. It felt like a small gesture in the face of something enormous.
Like Bashibi, Sheeba* is another woman for whom the ground is always, in some sense, about to give way. We met her in Goran Bose, a remote community in the Basanti Block of South 24 Paraganas, close to the Malta river. Surrounded by women and children, she made sure everyone had a cup of tea before speaking about herself.
Sheeba told us that the flooding and destruction caused by a storm had left her and her family homeless on the highway for an entire month. Though she clearly recalled her story and made everyone laugh with her witty remarks as she said it, we were also told she continues to struggle with her health and a persistent lack of livelihood. The laughter, we came to understand, is not denial. It is how you stay afloat when everything around you is collapsing.
Women like Bashibi and Sheeba are not exceptions. They represent thousands of women across this region who have to live with dysfunctional families, domestic violence, boys drawn into gangs , girls married off young because education is unaffordable, and the constant threat of migration and trafficking underneath all of it. These are the communities that Rupantaran Foundation and Goranbose Gramin Bikash Kendra (GGBK), two grassroot NGOs both part of the Rebuild India Fund portfolio in West Bengal, have spent decades working with and learning from.
Rupantaran Foundation
Over the last 15 years of work, through constant learning, adaptation and deep community engagement, Rupantaran has built something that outsiders rarely manage-trust.
Across villages in Sunderbans, they have created safe peer spaces for young people, trained women in seed farming and multi-cropping, built strong and stand-alone youth leadership from within communities, and enabled women’s farming collectives to grow, not just as farmers working around the problem of salinity in the soil, but as a collective voice against the violence many face behind closed doors.
One story has stayed with us.
A woman in the community was being subjected to repeated violence by her husband. Rupantaran staff were not directly involved in what happened next. When news spread through the village, nearly a thousand women gathered silently outside the couple’s home. They did not shout. They did not threaten. Their presence alone was enough. Faced with the collective strength of the women around him, the husband, visibly intimidated, apologised to his wife.
That question of identity sits at one of the focal points of Rupantaran’s founding. The climate crisis, they came to understand, is not gender neutral. It finds the fault lines that already exist and pries them open. A woman who did not have a name, could not receive food because she had no documents, no proof of existence on a paper. They did not make decisions. They were not counted.
So instead of simply distributing aid, Rupantaran decided to seek answers to a different question. Could they build an ecosystem of women farmers, establish gender justice while taking climate action? One story illustrates how that thinking evolved.
After a devastating cyclone, a woman carefully dug onions and vegetables out of the mud surrounding her collapsed home. It was the only patch of soil that had escaped severe salinity. Using what little she had managed to save; she prepared a meal for the Rupantaran team when they visited.
That insight became the foundation of Ankur, Rupantaran’s women’s empowerment programme. The women they met were not asking to be fed. They wanted the means to feed themselves.Women asked specifically for lime powder, a cheap and effective way to reduce soil salinity and grow organic crops. When we visited Patibania in the Namkhana Block, we ate lunch cooked from vegetables grown organically by one of their beneficiaries and it was genuinely the best meal of the trip!
Today, more than 7,000 families are reached through Ankur – with 10,000 women farmers coming together through the programme’s collectives, something unexpected follows: women outside the collectives offer their time through participation and sharing of resources, a true community by definition. One programme had generated another. That is what trust, built slowly and without shortcuts, looks like at scale.
[1] A district in West Bengal, South of the Sunderbans
[2] A river with seven mouths
