Bangladesh lies on the world’s largest flood plains, where water from the North Himalayas transit to the south in the Bay of Bengal. The people of different parts of the country have to face floods on a regular basis. Floods bring silt and make the land fertile, but rapid change in climate makes those floods more frequent and devastating, causing harsher pain and suffering.
In May and June 2022, the river waters in northeast Bangladesh overflowed and caused the worst flood in the greater Sylhet in the last 122 years due to record-breaking rainfall in the Indian states of Meghalaya, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Also, Sylhet itself experienced the highest rainfall in 62 years at the same time. It was a rare case that Sylhet faced flash floods, monsoon floods, river bank floods, and rain-fed floods simultaneously. The flash floods submerged around 107,785.5 hectares of cropland, and more than 4.3 million people got impacted. Houses got damaged, and livestock got lost. Losses and sufferings were great, but the grit and determination to survive were even greater.
This body of work tells the personal stories of the flood survivors in northeast Bangladesh. Though these people living on the edge represent the most vulnerable community to the impact of climate change, they are also the faces of resilience. This series depicts the personality portraits of these marginalized and unheard people during their most challenging time and shows how they fight to rebuild their lives.