No crops, no brides: how rising seas are killing India’s coastal villages

Budheswar Kardi tills and sows seeds on his land. The farmers of Udaykani are trying to revive their fields, he says, but with little success. Photograph: Aishwarya Mohanty/The Migration Story

In Udaykani, a coastal village in the east Indian state of Odisha, the walls of houses were once adorned with the marriage motifs of conches and shehnais, an oboe-like instrument played at weddings, considered auspicious for bride and groom. Today, the designs have faded. The village, once a hub of joyous celebrations, has not welcomed a bride in more than a decade.

With the sea on one side and fields on the other, Udaykani, along with neighbouring Tandahar village, was hit hard by a super-cyclone, the most intense ever recorded in the northern Indian Ocean, that lashed the state 25 years ago. Along with the growing environmental volatility of the Bay of Bengal over the years, it has meant a rise in soil and water salinity and subsequent loss of agricultural land, livelihoods and marriage prospects.