£78m Tourism Plan for Indian Mangroves Mired in Protests

An Indian billionaire's plan to build a series of floating "eco-tourist" cities on the Sundarbans, the world's biggest mangrove swamp, is being opposed by campaigners who say it amounts to the "total destruction" of the pristine delta system.

Subrata Roy's £78m project includes medical centres, a casino, a golf course and five-star hotels on four islands linked by speedboats in the wetland straddling the border with Bangladesh.

His company, Sahara, which has acquired 2,250 hectares (900 acres) of land, says it will bring employment to one of the poorest places in India. Work was supposed to start this month but has been delayed by the protests.

Unesco designated the Sundarbans a world heritage site in 1987.

Environmentalists say the maze of rivers and mangroves has some of the world's most endangered species, such as the Bengal tiger and the Irrawady dolphin, as well as providing a livelihood for 500,000 villagers whose access to the creeks and streams would be blocked by the development.

"This is a plaything for the rich that is being created in the guise of development," said Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary, a magazine which campaigns on green issues. "It would be a particularly short-sighted way for the government to conduct business if this gets approved."

One prominent critic is Amitav Ghosh, whose latest novel, The Hungry Tide, is set in the Sundarbans.

He described the scheme as ill-conceived, pointing out that the Ganges river system, which empties through the Sundarbans, carried eight times as much silt as the Amazon.

He said: "There is little scope for scuba diving or lying on beaches. You have flooding, there are sharks and crocodiles in the water. Islands come and go.

"It is a very inhospitable environment, and because no in-depth marine survey has been carried out, we have no idea of the extent of the biodiversity there. If this goes ahead, we may never know."

Urbanisation and industrialisation have eaten away at the area's wildlife. In the 19th century British naturalists reported that it teemed with marine life, but most of that has disappeared.

In 1832, 20 whales were beached in the marshy flatlands outside Calcutta. Today that area houses the city's infotech companies.

Mr Ghosh said the Sundarbans had hidden meteorological dangers which the developers seemed to have disregarded: they protected the cities upstream of the salt waterways from the frequent gales and cyclones off the Bay of Bengal.

"The word cyclone was originally coined by the British in the 19th century when they tried to built a port in the Sundarbans. It was swamped by a storm. That is something Sahara might want to consider."

Sahara said yesterday that it had completed a two-year environmental impact survey which took into account the worst case scenario.

"We already have up to 500 people a day coming into the Sundarbans as part of unorganised tourism.

"All we are offering is to regulate that and develop the area in a environmentally sustainable way," said its project manager, Romi Datta.

He said the four island and three floating "five star facilities", each "appropriately" themed would attract domestic and foreign tourists.

"For example, where the Ganges ends is an island called Sagar, where we have taken 370 acres of land. Because it is a sacred river we will look to build ayurvedic and yoga facilities there."

But environmentalists argued that a development of this scope would destroy the very habitat the company claimed it wanted to protect.

Joy Dasgupta, a professor of anthropology in Calcutta, said: "It is unclear as to how the ecosystem cope with the sewage, grease, oil and detergents that will inevitably be discharged by such a project.

"The consequences are difficult to imagine, but they all look pretty bad."