Click to play videoKanupur Village (Orissa): 52-year-old Maheswar Rout is leaving Kanupur, a village in the Kendrapara district of Orissa, where he spent his entire life. Kanupur had been home to his father and grandfather too, and Rout's decision to leave the place has not been an easy one.
The sea, which is right next to his house today, wasn't there years ago. It was quite a distance away and Kanupur was a much bigger village, Maheshwar fondly remembers.
For instance, a hand pump that now stands on the seaside was at the centre of the village earlier. The rising sea has made the land infertile, and Maheswar, once a well-off farmer, is now struggling to make ends meet.
"Our houses and land are all gone into the sea. We are farmers, no one is helping us, how will we survive?" Maheswar Rout asks.
Some of bricks that one can spot on the seaside today were once part of a beautiful house in the village and the sea was at lest one kilometer away from that spot. But thanks to global warming, everything has been devastated in just a few years.
During the last five years, more than 50 per cent of the 4,000-odd villagers have fled.
And it's not just humans who are feeling the heat. Forest officials say the nesting site of endangered Olive Ridley turtles along the Gahirmatha coast nearby is vanishing fast. According to official figures, in the last two decades, 200 metres of the nesting sites have been submerged.
Global warming is no longer just the stuff of dire warnings. Its a grim and harsh reality for thousands of villagers in coastal Orissa.
The people of Kanupur are probably the first refugees of global warming in India. To make matters worse for the people of Kanupur, the government is not providing any help, claiming that the village is situated inside a sanctuary.
"There are some other factors compounding the perceptible global warming phenomenon which leads to such disasters, like the highly-eroding coast and the huge discharge of sediments by the river system," SC Mohanty, Principal Chief conservator of forests, Orissa, says.
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