A few metres from the makeshift stage is a pond, similar to the innumerable water bodies that dot the region. This one, however, is unique: it is India’s first pond-based swimming pool; a result of the combined efforts of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the World Health Organisation, and the West Bengal government, supported by The George Institute for Global Health and the Child in Need Institute (CINI).
According to UNESCO figures, almost 30 per cent of the land in the Sundarbans in West Bengal is covered by water bodies. The region also has the world’s highest rate of child mortality due to drowning, says Dr Jagnoor Jagnoor, senior research fellow, Injury Program at The George Institute for Global Health.
According to World Health Organization (WHO) data, drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide, accounting for 7 per cent of all injury-related deaths, and low- and middle-income countries account for over 90 per cent of unintentional drowning. WHO recognises July 25 as ‘World Drowning Prevention Day’.
In the villages of the Sundarbans, it would not be a stretch to say that every family knows at least one person who has drowned, says 20-year-old Shyamoli Moira. As a child, while playing by the family pond, she watched her uncle and aunt nearly drown in the water body, a memory that she says will remain ingrained in her mind.
“My uncle and aunt were only a few years older than me. They fell into the water and both did not know how to swim. I was small and was unable to call out for help. I didn’t know how to swim either. Then, my mother came out and asked me where the two were and I pointed towards the water,” says Moira. Her mother quickly called out to villagers for help, an intervention that likely saved the lives of both children because not too much time had passed.
While drowning is a pressing public health concern, in West Bengal, few adults know survival swimming, and even fewer children under the age of 10 have these life-saving skills, which contributes to the high rates of child mortality caused by drowning, experts say. Studies show that three children drown every day all over West Bengal, but a lack of comprehensive documentation means that accurate figures for the total number of deaths caused due to drowning every year in the state are hard to find.
“You will find ponds near every home here, located just a step away from the house. Every home will have up to two ponds in this region,” says Moira. While these water bodies are essential to the livelihoods of the villagers who live around them, they also pose a significant safety risk for infants and children. “We use the ponds for everything—from washing clothes to using it for bathing. These ponds are huge and are also used for fishing,” Moira says.
At India’s first pond-based swimming pool in Baikuntapur village, a community pond was modified with a platform and fencing to teach and encourage survival swimming to children between ages six to 10 years.
“You don’t want to teach younger children because they are curious. They don’t have enough skill sets and they try to explore in the water, so it becomes tricky. The WHO best-practice guidelines recommend it for six to 10 year-olds and that is what we are trying to implement. We are not trying to make them athletes. All we want is for them to be able to survive for 30 seconds to two minutes if they find themselves in trouble in water,” says Dr Jagnoor.
The idea of pond-based swimming pools originated in neighbouring Bangladesh sometime in 2002-2003. Until about two decades ago, the country had high rates of drowning. But government and non-governmental interventions, along with socio-political factors such as improved housing and access to piped water, have significantly reduced these numbers.
Studies indicated that initiating a public health project in West Bengal that was successful in Bangladesh had a greater likelihood of being an effective intervention to combat the issue of drowning among children.
“Bangladesh is a small country and is not that diverse in topography. They all speak one language in a high-density population. It is easier to work with similar interventions in West Bengal because the contexts in Bangladesh and West Bengal are similar. There are ponds and riverine areas. It is a low-lying area; a delta, and it has rural and remote populations,” says Dr Jagnoor.
With swimming lessons in the village pond-based pool about to start for small children this week, Halder hopes that more people are encouraged to enrol their children for survival swimming training. When Halder was six years old, her father took her to the family’s pond, tied plastic bottles to function as flotation devices and taught her how to swim. “My father is not a trained swimmer. He was self-taught, but he wanted to teach me,” Halder says.
Not everyone in the village knows how to swim—even among adults, villagers interviewed for this report say. “I think there is a perception that rural populations should know how to swim. Humans aren’t expected to have an inherent ability to swim. Our lungs are not meant for that and we don’t have self-buoyant bodies. It might not be something that you need to have rigorous training in, but there needs to be a risk-assessment for the kind of water body that it is, the risks of when you go into it and how you may or may not find yourself in trouble. All these are passed down from generation to generation or acquired through an outdoor source and that hasn’t happened in these populations,” Dr Jagnoor says about the Sundarbans.
At the village pond-based pool, local residents with training in survival swimming teach children who want to learn. Halder says these lessons are important for all villagers, but particularly for girls and women. The Sundarbans skirt the Bay of Bengal, the world’s largest bay and it is one of the most cyclone-prone regions on the earth.
In this region, storm surges have historically caused the most severe damage in tropical cyclone-related disasters. Floods caused by storm surges are a significant threat to the inhabitants of the Bay of Bengal, particularly the Sundarbans. A unique feature of this coast along the West Bengal-Bangladesh belt is that it is crisscrossed by several rivers and rivulets, and the elevation of the islands is 4 to 5 metres above sea level.
When cyclones hit the Sundarbans, it is common for flood water to enter homes in strong currents, says Halder. “Because of the strong currents, many times people are not able to leave the house and go to cyclone shelters. If children know how to swim, they can reach safe spaces. Men somehow manage to swim to safety, but women and girls don’t step into water bodies and are unable to do the same,” she says.
These days, even remote villages in the Sundarbans are slowly getting access to piped water, making it less necessary for women to utilise ponds for everyday use in the frequency that it was required till even a decade ago. This means that women and girls have less practice and ease with water bodies. “When women go to the ponds, it is just for bathing. So they are unfamiliar with swimming and don’t know how to save themselves from drowning,” says Halder.
For this initiative, researchers have specifically designed the pond-based swimming pools to ensure a safe space for children learning survival swimming, that would be appropriate for West Bengal. Among other arrangements, one section of the pond has been fenced with nets to separate the pool from the larger pond.
“The idea is to have six kids under one adult’s supervision. You want them to be barricaded so that they can be monitored. The original model implemented in Bangladesh does not have nets, but here in West Bengal, they do it because of snakes (in the water). They also have a platform, because with ponds, you can’t maintain the depth of the water, and this way, it is waist-height for the child to stand, and there is no risk of drowning,” says Dr Jagnoor.
“Most deaths will occur in areas where the number of water bodies is high and mostly in (rural) communities. This model gives us the opportunity to build low-cost swimming training areas,” says Dr Tej Prakash Sinha, MBBS, MS Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, who also serves as a technical expert at Ministry of Health, in preparing national policies on pre-hospital care, emergency care and trauma care. “Fencing of risky water bodies will also prevent accidental falls,” says Dr Sinha. Clean swimming pools are high-maintenance and expensive, even in high-income countries. The pond-based model becomes a more accessible solution for rural communities which require it the most, experts interviewed for this report say.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the first pond-based swimming pool was implemented in West Bengal, says Dr Jagnoor. “As a researcher, you look at where the burden is and the Sundarbans has the highest child drowning mortality rates in the world. You can’t turn a blind eye and you have to do something about it. The effectiveness in Bangladesh was very high, and they had an 80 per cent reduction in mortality cases between 2012-2015.”
“Every day, three innocent lives are lost due to drowning in the Sundarbans; a loss that is completely avoidable. CINI’s implementation of strategies recommended by the World Health Organisation has shown promising outcomes,” says Dr Samir Chaudhari, founder secretary of the Child in Need Institute.
The issue of drowning in the country has also been concerning enough for the Indian government to pay attention to this public health crisis. In December 2023, India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare unveiled the ‘Strategic Framework for Drowning Prevention’, which, among other objectives, also outlined goals to formulate national and state drowning prevention action plans.
While the pond-based swimming pool in West Bengal is the first of its kind in the country, there are plans underway to implement this model in other states across India as well, where the model is adapted depending on a wide range of topical socio-cultural and geographical factors. For young girls like Halder, the pond-based swimming pool is an asset to the community. “The swimming lessons are starting with school students, but we hope that word spreads and that women and girls can also learn how to swim here,” she says.
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