On 17 February 2026 the National Green Tribunal refused to treat Ghoramara as permanent. Hearing a matter that had begun with a newspaper’s warning that some 40 per cent of the island could vanish by 2042, the Tribunal recorded that the Indian Sundarbans had lost, on the Geological Survey of India’s own reckoning placed before it, more than 250 square kilometres of land between 1969 and 2019 ~ Ghoramara alone falling from 8.59 to 3.83 square kilometres over those fifty years ~ and directed a joint committee to prepare, within three months, a comprehensive plan of coastal defence and resettlement.

About four thousand people still live on what remains of the island. The tide, as ever, had not waited on the cause list. The Tribunal’s alarm is not eccentric. A peer-reviewed study in npj Climate Action, published in March 2026 by Jyotirmoy Biswas and Sabyasachi Maiti, read thirty-five years of satellite imagery from 1988 to 2023 and found the delta’s southern, sea-facing shorelines retreating faster than the rest ~ more than thirty metres a year along stretches of the eroding coast, and above fifty on the islands of Jambudwip and Bhangaduni ~ and its authors, tellingly, name managed retreat among the responses worth planning for.

The delta is squeezed from two directions at once: its sea level is rising faster than the global average even as the low islands themselves subside, and each spring tide drives salt further into soils that once grew paddy. Ghoramara is only the sharpest case. Reuters reported in 2024 that its population had fallen from about 7,000 to some 4,000 in the single decade to 2020, the young leaving first; the neighbouring island of Lohachara slipped off usable maps in the 1990s. On Mousuni, a little to the west,........

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