By Chiranjib Haldar
According to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, the world will see a staggering 25 million to 1 billion ‘Environmental Displaced Persons’ in the coming future. This will not only influence transnational relations and geopolitical relations between countries but will also foment fresh problems and conflicts while dealing with this incipient trend. Various terms, like climate refugee, climate migrant and environmental migrant have been devised to denote people displaced by climatic adversities. However, these coinages are under scanner as the concept of climate-induced migration is comparatively new. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has elucidated how the word ‘refugee’ needs to have an expanding definition since environmental migrants do not get recognised which makes their relocation and habitation tough. Every monsoon, India faces a climate exodus as torrential downpours hit North East India, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarkhand and many other states.
The monsoon mayhem that sweeps through India and the subcontinent, killing many, displacing thousands and marooning villages also gives an impetus to climate migration. For example, in Assam this year, over 2.6 lakh people across 11 districts have already been affected, submerging umpteen hamlets and thousands of hectares of cropland. Landslides and glacial floods are common in Sikkim uprooting locals who are always at the receiving ends of nature’s vagaries. As communication links are disrupted annually during heavy rains in Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura, especially the bordering districts, there is a riparian population flow often unnoticed. India has witnessed myriad issues pertaining to extreme weather fluctuations such as glacial lake outbursts, landslides, cloudbursts, ice moraine erosion as in upper reaches of Uttarakhand and Sikkim and massive downstream flooding therein.
Climate migration is momentous and substantial in India and other South Asian nations where an unanticipated number of people are facing the peril of displacement with figures expected to rise exponentially. The International Organisation on Migration (IOM) evaluates that on a global scale, between 25 million and 1 billion people would be constrained to drift from their homelands due to climate change and environmental degradation by 2050. In India, ‘Climate Action Network South Asia’ projects the number of climate migrants in India to escalate to 45 million by 2050. Regardless of the lurking dangers of climate migration, decision makers in India are oblivious to the threat and have no standing policy framework. However, India is a signatory to the United Nation’s Sendai Framework, which recognises disaster displacement as a major driver of livelihood risk. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) also identifies the troika of migration, displacement and planned habitation as a fundamental climate risk management issue.
Attempts have been made in the past to raise this sensitive issue in the Indian parliament though there is reluctance among states to embrace mandatory legal obligations linked to climate migration. In 2022, Pradyut Bordoloi, a Congress MP from Assam, had introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill as a private member’s bill to ‘establish an appropriate policy framework for the protection and rehabilitation of internally displaced climate migrants and for all matters connected therewith’. Bordoloi presented his personal observation in the Lok Sabha on how inhabitants of riverine Assam suddenly become homeless from the inundated Brahmaputra and are forced to settle in prohibited forest land. The bill appears to be in cold storage with no visible urgency of ratification. Cutting across party lines in the same year, Heena Gavit, BJP MP from Maharashtra introduced the Rehabilitation and Relocation of Persons Displaced due to Climate Change Bill. This Bill also proposed a Climate Migration Fund. Both the proposed bills have not been enacted but have only highlighted the crucial need for proper legislation towards climate induced displacement in India.
In international treatises, there is a distinction between the handling of migrants and refugees on account of the varying obligations that they put on destination countries. The 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) held in Baku (2024), reiterated displaced persons and migrants as beneficiaries of climate funding and encouraged their inclusive participation in climate financing for human rights and adaptation. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage has been operational in 2025 with the scope envisaging ‘displacement, relocation and migration’ and a pledge to widen its ambit at the next UN Climate Conference coming up at Belem, Brazil this November.
As in Bangladesh and Myanmar, women migrants in India recurrently undergo triple discrimination given their position as women, unprotected worker and migrant. Their condition becomes more precarious in India as women uprooted due to climate change are always prone to violence, human trafficking and armed conflicts. Akin to Nepal, Indian women living in poverty are more vulnerable to environmental risks and climate change. Crucially, due to traditional gender dynamics, men’s climate mobility can amplify women’s immobility. Thus environmental migration can deepen pre-existing gender divides and expose women to new susceptibilities.
Migration during childhood and adolescence can disrupt critical developmental processes such as identity formation and peer integration. These lead to potential vulnerabilities, poor mental health and depression. Adult migration can be more stressful. Older migrants may face difficulties in adjusting to the new cultural settings because their habits and ways of life are already cemented. They may find it tough to find suitable jobs or assimilate socially. Such vulnerabilities increase their risk of isolation and cultural stress. When landslides uproot families and livelihoods in Kerala’s Wayanad or the Teesta riverbed rises due to glacial outbursts in North Sikkkim, both result in climate induced migration and displacement.
Gender is considered a fundamental variable in the decision process of migration. When frequent flooding and erosion displace marginalised communities in riverine lower Assam, Majuli islands, Brahmaputra chars (silt sandbars) and floodplains, gender becomes extraneous. The migrants flee to a temporary shelter and begin life from scratch. In deltaic Sunderbans or coastal Bay of Bengal, littoral erosion takes a toll; women are seen to fend for themselves and shift in search of alternate livelihoods or shift to subsistence. Bangladeshi women migrants wallowing into India from low lying estuaries are trapped in a vicious cycle where they are exploited for forced labour and trafficking. However women from impoverished backgrounds moving to cities and towns for better sustenance do not bracket as climate migrants.
Climate induced migration is still under the veil in India as in Bangladesh and Nepal. India logged 5.4 million internal displacements from climate-induced cataclysms in 2024, by far the highest in South Asia according to the Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID). Floods in many states and armed conflicts as in Manipur were primary drivers exacerbating these displacements in disaster prone hotspots. The response of both the Congress-led UPA and BJP-led NDA regimes over the years to the needs of climate-conflict related displacements has been arbitrary or ad hoc with notable variations among states that undermine their civil or constitutional rights. On top, disaster cycles in India have become more erratic and frequent, overwhelming traditional coping strategies. The meteorological impact of climate change can be divided into other distinct channels of migration too. A rise in sea levels, salinisation of farmland, desertification and water scarcity also induce migration in India. And non-climate carters like government policy, population growth and community resilience to natural disasters contribute to the degree of vulnerability people experience.
(The writer is a commentator on politics and society.)
