On a shrinking island, girls play football against the weather

Dressed in her shorts and t-shirt – a rare attire for girls on India’s Sagar Island in West Bengal, fourteen-year-old Nandita Sahu feels her eyes glisten when she talks about football and her dream of becoming a professional player someday.

Here, girls still face stigma for exposing their legs and arms while practising the sport. Yet bending gender norms in a society with rigid expectations of women is only one of the many obstacles confronting young female athletes on the island: vulnerability to climate change makes a career in the sport even harder to pursue.

Sagar sits at the western edge of the Indian Sundarbans delta, home to the world’s largest mangrove forest and now a climate hotspot, with sea-level rise outpacing the global average of nearly 4.5 mm/year, and saltwater flooding the island more often.

The region is among the most cyclone-struck stretches of the Indian coast, according to data from the India Meteorological Department, and each storm takes more of the coastline and breaks more of the embankments. Where they breach, saltwater floods in, damaging farmland and contaminating drinking water, with knock-on effects for health.

As one of 40 girls enrolled in a football training programme run on the island by the civil society organisation Sabuj Sangha, which began in December 2024, Nandita expresses moroseness when practice sessions get cancelled due to extreme weather conditions.

“Those days come often. During extreme rain, we cannot play as the field becomes muddy. We also fall sick while practising during that season”, she said. All the other 13 of Nandita's teammates interviewed by Play the Game described the same pattern.

The programme holds practice twice a week at a government school in Sagar’s Sumatinagar village. When it rains, the ground floods with saline water and mud, and the water takes days to recede. When the girls turn up to practise in standing water, they are exposed to the skin infections, diarrhoeal illness, and worm infestation documented across the region after extreme weather events.

Sanjib Jana, a 28-year-old former player who now coaches the girls, has watched conditions change within his own playing lifetime. “The climatic conditions under which we played and how the girls are playing now have changed drastically”, he told Play the Game. “There has been excessive rain in the past years. So how do these girls practise under the muddy conditions?”

These environmental issues unfold at the heart of one of India's largest annual pilgrimages. Sagar Island draws devotees from across the country year-round, and each January it hosts the Gangasagar mela, a Hindu festival where millions gather for a holy dip at the confluence of the Ganges and the sea.

Cyclones, migration, and the price girls pay

The United Nations acknowledges the ways climate change is already reshaping sport: playing surfaces damaged by flooding, drought and extreme temperatures; violent storms damaging buildings and other infrastructure; coastal erosion and sea-level rise eating into sports grounds in seaside areas; unseasonal rainfall leading to cancellation or abandonment of sport matches, and heatwaves causing increased risk of exhaustion of players. These, the framework stresses, are not projections but impacts already occurring worldwide.

Sagar shows what those impacts look like on the ground – or rather, how much ground is left. Over time, natural processes and anthropogenic factors have contributed to the island’s coastal erosion.

Sea level at Diamond Harbour, the station nearest Sagar Island, rose by 5.74 mm a year between 1948 and 2015, research shows. The same research links the coastline's retreat to damage to infrastructure and livelihoods, recording significant changes in land use between 1990 and 2020.

Alongside the gradual retreat of the coastline, the island has taken a series of sharper blows. Seven cyclones have struck the island since 2019: Fani and Bulbul in 2019, Amphan in 2020, Yaas in 2021, Sitrang in 2022, Hamoon in 2023, and Remal in 2024. Each has hastened the decline of an agriculture that was already fragile and was once the primary source of income for the local people.

These shifts have reshaped how people earn a living. According to a study of coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion in Sagar's Botkhali area, around 32 percent of residents had turned to fishing and 24 percent still farmed; most of the rest had migrated to work as labourers elsewhere, returning to till their land when they could.

“From being dependent on agriculture, they are now dependent on small businesses, weekend tourism and annual pilgrimage gathering – the Gangasagar mela”, said Tuhin Ghosh, professor and director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at the Kolkata-based Jadavpur University. “We see a lot of people migrating mostly to Kerala because they find it culturally safe – living close to the coastal area, finding the same variety of food.”

This is the reality for many of the girls Play the Game interviewed, whose parents have left home to find work – some as far as southern India, others for urban areas in West Bengal. Nandita lives at her grandfather's house in Sumatinagar while her mother cleans houses in Kolkata and her ailing father stays on another island in the Sundarbans.

Sanjukta Sahu, who supervises the football project in the village, told Play the Game that migration has ripple effects on the children. “When parents move out, the girls are growing up at their maternal grandparents’ place, where they may have to attend to some domestic duties in these years or may not have the attention to diet needed to engage in sports”, she said. “It would be different if they were living with their parents.”

Sahu argues the programme's effects reach beyond sport. In her account, giving girls a reason to be out of the house and in a group has helped push back against early marriage and teenage pregnancy in the village. “By training these girls, we are setting an example for hundreds of other girls who look up to them”, she said.

That works in both directions. Moumita Mondal, a 16-year-old who hopes one day to train at a better facility in Kolkata, gets as much from being the example as she gives. "In our village, when a girl chooses football, they do not have full support like boys do", she said. "The biggest motivation to play is encouraging girls from other families to join this sport." Her father works seasonally in construction in Kerala and Tamil Nadu; her mother is a domestic worker in the village.

In the Sundarbans, adolescent girls are often pulled out of school – to migrate with fathers or husbands in search of work, or to take care of home chores and mind younger siblings. “Often, they marry early, as that means one less mouth to feed”, said Upasona Ghosh, a social anthropologist and associate professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health, who has worked extensively in the region. “Playing football is not only about bodily autonomy. It gives them a window to delay marriage, and to have aspirations”, she told Play the Game.

The health toll of playing through the heat

For the girls on Sagar, that window opens only when the weather allows. Piu Giri, an 18-year-old History undergraduate who wants to join the police force, says football has made her feel seen in her village. The weather is what gets in the way. “The heat gets to me, and I get headaches”, she said. “When I have to skip practice because of the weather, I feel like I’m missing out on months of progress.”

Similarly, Mondal said the heat makes practice hard: “If we run very fast during the summers, we feel nausea, and our heads spin from exhaustion.”

The impact of climate change on these young athletes is compounded by substandard child health across the Sundarbans. A 2010 study cited in a report by the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies (SaciWATERs) found that more than a third of the children in the region are chronically malnourished.

“When it comes to playing sports, there are biological consequences of heat exposure”, Dr Bhishmaraj Srivastava told Play the Game. Srivastava is the former regional health coordinator for Asia at Terre des hommes, the non-profit that funded the study.

“Young girls who do not have adequate nutrition would have less capacity to combat extreme heat, as they are at increased risk of early fatigue, dehydration and heat exhaustion”, he said. “In addition, there is the burden of mental health trauma from extreme weather events.”

If any of that turns serious, hospital care means Kolkata, 110 km away. The route to the state capital involves a ferry crossing timed to the tide and cancelled in bad weather, then another three and a half hours by road. A 2013 report by the Institute of Health Management Research found that the geographic vulnerability of the Sundarbans made healthcare hard to access. Climate change widens both problems at once: more illness, less means of treating it.

While the reality on the ground is clear, the evidence base needed to guide policy on climate-related health is still thin. “In a region like the Sundarbans, our understanding of the link between climate and health is beginning to take shape”, said Indu K Murthy, sector head at the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, in an interview with Play the Game.

“We need stronger data, clearer attribution, and more research to identify these signals”, she added. “Right now, even within State Action Plans on Climate Change, adaptation is central – but it is often focused on infrastructure, with less emphasis on health dimensions.”

Adaptation meets poverty

Another factor exacerbating the effects of climate change on the girls of the Sundarbans is poverty. More than 40 percent of households in the region live below the poverty line, and 13 percent are classed as the poorest of the poor. That shapes what adapting to the heat can realistically mean.

Riya Jana, a secondary school student, has been told by her coach to eat more protein – lentils, eggs – to help her hold up in the heat. Her family has no land, so her father runs a small shop and her mother tutors children in the village – the patchwork income that has replaced farming for many there. These meals cost more than her household can spend. The adaptation advice is sound; acting on it is another matter.

For many girls in the Sundarbans, football can look like a luxury. “The girls are left asking: should we worry about feeding ourselves or play football when our parents struggle for basics?”, said Anadi Barua, former Indian footballer and former chief coach of India’s women’s football team. “The spirit of these girls is such that they play well even by eating panta bhaat”, he told Play the Game, referring to fermented rice soaked in water.

Yet for players like 17-year-old Bipasha Gayen, who dreams of joining the Indian Army in the future, the sport can help them look past the difficulties. “Coming for the football game despite the financial precarity at home has been the most liberating feeling”, she said. Bipasha has three other siblings. Her father works as a daily wage labourer in Kerala, and her mother is a homemaker.

For coach Sanjib Jana, the way forward would be to take the girls to Kolkata, where they could train on a proper pitch. "My only dream is to see them succeed in football," he said.

The football field as a lab

Sabuj Sangha's answer is to treat the field as a tool to develop the local community. Ansuman Das, the organisation's secretary and director, describes it as a laboratory: somewhere the girls learn communication, collective action, and leadership alongside football. "They come to the field to practise, but go back with much more," he told Play the Game.

Some of that is practical. The organisation has been working with the village council and local schools to identify grounds where girls can play, which Das hopes will mean the local governance system takes an interest in girls playing football. Some of it is longer-term. "We encourage them to think of potential solutions to cope with the climatic conditions of the Sundarbans, and how they can be active participants in disaster risk reduction," he said.

Whether that is enough against a rising sea is another question. What is certain is that twice a week, on a field that floods with saltwater, forty girls turn up.