Session 8.1

Ghurni Bhattacharya

BIO

Ghurni Bhattacharya, hailing from Kolkata, India, is currently pursuing a Double Master of Arts in Sociology from the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University in Germany and from the Department of Sociology and Economic Law at Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Italy, under the Erasmus+ scholarship. She works as a student Research Assistant at Bielefeld University. Her primary research interests include studying climate-induced poly-crises, labor migration, and mobilities in the context of climate change, local climate adaptation solutions in response to environmental degradation and climate change, eco-social justice, etc. She is interested in inequality studies. She is associated with the Policy Team of the Human Rights Working Group in Youngo and advocates for human rights, especially migrants' and indigenous rights. She has past International Delegation experiences, such as at UN Women UK and UNECE, championing environmental and gender justice.

ABSTRACT

The Indian Sundarbans experiences environmental hazards of all types from super cyclones, floods, river, sea level rise to high salinity intrusion, riverbank erosion, changes in precipitation levels, and heatwaves. Environmental changes often leave their hazardous footprints by either wiping away the signs of habitation or forcing people to survive with meager livelihood opportunities. Sundarbans are mostly known for their unique biodiversity, including the habitat of the Royal Bengal Tiger, and it is recognized as the World’s Largest Mangrove Forest, being both a UNESCO World Heritage site and Ramsar site. However, less attention is dedicated to the islanders' lives and livelihoods from a people-centric approach.

To reemphasize the people’s lives and livelihood concerns, this proposal would humbly highlight some pressing challenges that islanders experience in the Indian Sundarbans throughout the year. The major objective of this proposal is to know the internal migrant workers' living and working conditions in the destination, as vividly described later.

The narratives of the islanders depict the survival challenges from the Indian Sundarbans. From environmental crisis to layers of inequalities, the islanders are accustomed to facing it all. The inhabitants are mostly agricultural workers, including marginal agricultural workers, fisherfolk, and daily wage earners such as local shopkeepers and tourist guides, who heavily depend on the environment to make ends meet. The high salinity ingress from the flood water gushing into the agricultural plot and ponds through the improperly maintained embankment breach lowers the agricultural output and hampers the local pisciculture, destabilizing the economic resource. Deep-sea fishing and ecotourism are seasonal and a risky endeavor, especially in the post-cyclonic phases. The lack of employment opportunities in the region pushes the islanders to trespass on the forest for more enriched natural resource extraction, either to meet their daily consumption or economic needs, despite the fear of tiger attacks. Trespassing forest without an official permit is a common practice that violates conservation principles. As a result, people face strict actions such as hefty fines, and boats or equipment are confiscated if caught. Paying these hefty fines breaks their economic backbone further. The lack of high-quality education centers, such as schools with proper educational facilities, indicates low human capital. The lack of stable alternative job opportunities in the region does not allow people to economically settle. Acute dearth of political willingness and poor efforts from national and international non-governmental organizations reinforce failed environmental disaster risk management and overall governance, such as poor road connectivity and even the lack of flood centers, given the fact that many islanders are internally displaced after the super cyclone struck with severity, are equally responsible and accountable for people's misery.

Corruption, land grabbing, unsustainable construction of resorts, and inland shrimp cultivation practices have only made the rich richer, resulting in environmental degradation. The inhabitants of Sundarbans only receive more attention during and aftermath of the cyclones as people or different organizations rush to offer short-term relief or aid, which is a short-term and inaccessible solution due to bureaucratic bottlenecks and local village-level politics.

Interestingly, the migration stories and narratives are also a less documented domain from the Indian Sundarbans, where out-migration is a dominant livelihood strategy to cope with the uncertainties, with remittances against this backdrop of uncertainties. The out migrants are mostly male and youth who go out as labor migrant workers either within the district or within different Indian states to earn better livelihood and fulfill aspirations.

The proposal aims to trace the living conditions and work conditions of the internal labor migrant workers from Sundarbans in their destination cities through qualitative multimethod short-term ethnography, including informal discussions, semi-structured interviews, and walk-in interviews collected during short-term fieldwork in January 2025 from Sonaga Plot 6 in Gosaba Block of the Indian Sundarbans. The inductive data provide an enriched idea about the struggle stories of the internal labor migrant workers from the Indian Sundarbans in the urban setting, which are often unexplored and overlooked. Therefore, this proposal has the potential to raise awareness about the labor migrant workers' conditions in the cityscape with a special emphasis on the hidden struggles, highlighting the non-economic costs of out-migration, where lies its study potential.

Mrittika Bhattacharya (she/her)

BIO

Mrittika is a doctoral researcher in Sociology and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research interests are environment-induced human mobilities and feminist environmentalism in the Sundarbans using participatory methods. She completed her M.A in Women's Studies with a Distinction from the University of York, UK and M.A in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She has also worked as an Associate Lecturer at the University of West of England, UK and Visiting Faculty at MRIIRS, India apart from collaborating with NGOs and think-tanks both in India and internationally.

ABSTRACT

Sundarban- the largest mangrove forest in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sharing borders between India and Bangladesh is susceptible to environmental stressors like floods, cyclones, sea-level rise, irregular rainfall and drought- ranked in order of the severity of their impacts by the women participants of my research project in Indian Sundarban. It has witnessed cross-border mobilities owing to a host of different factors in the post-independence period. Among those, the last decade or so has witnessed mobilities being primarily driven by environmental stressors exacerbated by climate change. Adding on to the already existing environmental vulnerabilities and injustice, the women of the region are disproportionately impacted owing to gendered hierarchies and their dependence on environmental resources both for income generation and performing daily household activities. The disruption in traditional sources of livelihood along with hindrances in various facets of life due to environmental stressors pushes many Bangladeshi women to move to the metropolitan city of Kolkata steered by porous borders, historical ties, cultural commonalities and the sense of ‘Bengaliness’ (ethnic identity). The irregular nature of such mobilities, data voids and absence of legal frameworks increases the difficulties faced by them after moving to India. Moreover, a majority of the grey and academic literatures do not account for the women's perspectives on adaptation, their experiences on either side of the political borders and whether they consider both the cross-border and intra-country mobilities as a part of their adaptive journeys or not.

In this backdrop, my ten-month-long feminist participatory research enquires into the intersections of environmental injustice, gender discrimination, cross-border mobilities of Bangladeshi women from Satkhira district to Indian Sundarban and further movement to the cities in response to environmental stressors. I use participatory methods like storytelling, ranking of environmental stressors according to the severity of impacts, counter-mapping and participatory workshops in the form of “adda” (a quintessential part of Bengali sociality, roughly referring to banter characterised by purposelessness, informality and reciprocity.) in collaboration with the NGO- Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra in Goranbose and Jharkhali villages. The women that I work with identify three types of mobilities practiced by them- crossing borders for moving to Kolkata, the male family members moving to the cities in Eastern and Southern parts of India after crossing the India-Bangladesh border while the women stay behind in Sundarban’s villages and moving temporarily to safer locations like “Aila centres” in the pre and post-disaster scenarios. When it comes to the second type of mobility, the women also share stories of moving to the cities along with their husbands and children for precarious, low-paid jobs or travelling on a daily basis to Kolkata for domestic work and working in construction sites. Challenging the west-centric notion of migration-as-adaptation in response to environmental stressors, the women look at the cross-border mobilities and then moving to the cities as a disjuncture in their journey of adaptation since they move away from environmental resources and their traditional sources of livelihoods. Moreover, the stay in the cities are mired with insecurities and instabilities causing them to question the effectiveness of moving. Rather, they define adaptation as “sticking by” without any international aid and governmental support on an everyday basis. It involves “sticking with” the environment and “sticking together” as a transnational community beyond political borders. They lay emphasis on the women-led everyday coping strategies like developing organic farming to floating gardens to building hand-made river banks for preventing the flood waters from entering into the agricultural lands which they themselves perceive as effective adaptive measures in comparison to cross-border mobilities. My ongoing doctoral research, thus, accounts for the primarily environment-induced mobilities practiced by these women, questions the approaches of migration-as-adaptation, complexifies how the international mobilities become localised while also highlighting the lesser studied self-perceptions of adaptation as expressed by the women. It brings the focus back to the lived experiences of these women, thereby addressing the loopholes in accounting for these mobilities in legal and policy frameworks as well as the literature gaps about the migrants’ perspectives and their perceptions of adaptation.

Sonu Tewari

BIO

Sonu Tewari has a PhD in Disaster Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She holds a master’s degree in disaster studies from the Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies, TISS, Mumbai and a post-graduate diploma in human rights law from the National Law University, Bangalore. She has worked in various disaster projects in India and is passionate about gender-related issues, particularly issues relating to women in the field of disaster studies. Her Ph.D. research focuses on understanding women’s lived experiences of displacement and forced migration as consequences of climate change and disasters in the Indian part of the Sundarbans Delta.

ABSTRACT

The paper interrogates the nexus between gender, mobilities and climate change. Despite increasing acknowledgements that "gender matters" in climate change and migration research, leading to recognising gender and social inequalities as crucial factors shaping vulnerability and resilience, existing literature falls short of adequately understanding the multi-scalar and temporal power dynamics influencing im/mobilities, especially in the context of the climate crisis (Vigil 2024). Also, decisions to move/not move are embedded within a broader historical and socio-political context, and reinstate the importance of recognising how historical and structural power relations, such as colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, shape both the production of climate vulnerability and how mobility and immobility are experienced and understood. To address these gaps, this paper uses a decolonial lens under the feminist political ecology framework to understand the historical as well as contextual drivers of mobilities by using phenomenology as an approach to explore “lived experiences” of mobilities in two villages, G-Plot and Mousani, a part of the Sundarbans delta in India. The paper borrows Resurrección's (2024) concept of “colonial erasures” from the feminist understanding of climate vulnerability to extend it to the climate mobilities paradigm. Studies in the context of climate portray displacement and migration as apolitical and historical, and assume a causal link between climate change and mobilities, linking all types of movement to climate change, thus concealing them within labels as “climate refugees/migrants”. Where the focus is on the numbers of those moving out, creating alarmist narratives or on the physical movement rather than a fundamental understanding of social meanings associated with their mobilities or interrogating the relationship of the communities with ecologies, waters and lands to which they are intimately, materially, and politically connected (Sultana, 2022) as well as how these are being shaped, altered, contested and reimagined in the context of the climate crisis which is unfolding in this region.

The paper first critically analyses the history of the development, migration, and environmental degradation to demonstrate how forests, water, and land were altered to settle marginalised populations and commodified for profit to promote colonial imaginaries and human expansion in the delta. Second, it explores how lived experiences of mobilities in the present time are gendered as well as shaped by factors such as embankment construction, declining livelihoods, alongside state-led interventions like ad-hoc forest conservation laws, tiger protection measures, fishing regulations, poor embankment maintenance, land grabbing, and the expansion of tourism, that act as colonial instruments of the state and are responsible for pushing some out of the delta, while others are left behind, as crisis/disasters make survival challenging.

Reference

• Vigil, S. (2024). Towards a feminist political ecology of migration in a changing climate. Geoforum, 155, 104076.

• Resurrección, B. P. (2024). Colonial erasures in gender and climate change solutions. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 15(5), e890.

• Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, 102638.