India: Impact of climate change on potters of Majuli

By Farhana Ahmed

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Climate change is visibly crippling the livelihood activities of the kumar communities in Salmora and Bongaon areas of Majuli on its southern banks with the Brahmaputra.

The great river which originates in Angsi glacier of Himalaya in Tibet has been flowing with heavy amount of silt every year. The melt in the glacier in Tibet surges its water level during the monsoon which has turning increasingly irregular and late.

The carrying of silt, as experienced in all rivers across the region, makes one bank deposited with heavy amount of sediments and sands making the river course to turn and smash the bank on the other side. In Bongaon and Salmora thousands of hectares of land has been eroded this way in last one decade or so.

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Considering the immense socio-cultural importance of the river island of Majuli – a centre of neo-Vaishnavite tradition and practice of Assamese Hinduism, the State Government with massive financial aid from the union government has launched various river management projects to control the flood and erosion by the Brahmaputra.

But these river-bank protection works have now becoming another barrier for the Kumars to sustain their traditional livelihood activity of pottery.

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These bank protection measures appear successful albeit leaving the kumar community unable to access to the clay for their traditional product. The finest clay for their work, called kumar Mati (clay of the potters) is found in the river bank areas of Salmora. As the river banks are now being covered by rock spars and geo-mates or geo-tubes, the kumars are finding it extremely difficult to collect the raw material meant for their products.

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