![]() ![]() ![]() The demand clearly exceeds supply.”Īccording to Baidya, exports of live mud crabs from India have risen around 30 percent in the last five years. “Now, about 90 percent of India’s export of the commodity is to China. “Since the last seven to eight years, live mud crabs also started gaining popularity in China,” he added. Rahul Baidya, a live mud crab exporter from Kolkata, said around 50 percent of the crabs he sources for Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore come from the Sundarbans. Based on growing demand, locals started to venture further into restricted forest areas to collect them. Starting in the 1980s, live mud crabs from the Sundarbans became a popular export item to Southeast Asia. Locals say tiger attacks have become more common in recent years as more villagers are forced to enter the reserve in search of crabs, honey or other forest goods they can sell to make a living. These red flags now appear almost every half kilometer along the rivers that snake through the Sundarban Tiger Reserve - evidence that human-tiger conflicts are no rare event here. The place then becomes a worship site of Bono Bibi, the forest goddess of the Sundarbans. Tags of bright red cloth blowing among the slender stems of trees are sometimes the only signs of human habitation in parts of the dense, daunting and lush green mangroves of the Sundarbans in coastal east India.īut bright though they are, these pieces of cloth are a sign of mourning, tied to a tree each time a tiger kills a human at the spot of the incident. As environmental pressures reduce livelihood options, villagers living in the region are claiming unfettered access to protected forest areas despite the high chance of tiger attacks.Ī temple to the forest goddess of the Sundarbans, Bono Bibi, sits in a village known locally as the Widow's Locality after the women whose husbands have been killed in tiger attacks / Credit: Namrata Acharya ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |