Chairperson:
Chetan Choithani, Assistant Professor, Inequality and Human Development Programme, NIAS
About the Lecture:
Coastal communities worldwide face threats of natural disasters, exacerbated by the perils of climate change. In the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove in the world, split between Bangladesh and West Bengal, climate-related environmental changes threaten some of the islands' very existence and challenge lives and livelihoods of a rural community with the erosion of land and water as means of livelihoods. Academic debates have ranged from policy focus on planned relocation to anthropologists' concern that local communities remain culturally tied to the land.
This presentation will attempt to place the Sundarbans within the broader political economy and policy context of West Bengal and India. While the environment-related loss of land and livelihood has received much attention, declining agricultural incomes is also connected to socio-economic structural factors such as fragmentation of land, mono-crop cultivation and absence of agricultural infrastructure and investment. State policies have not addressed the issue of creating alternative livelihoods for large numbers of landless households. About 34 per cent of the population live below the poverty line and 75% of households have at least one member working in an urban area, but only as unskilled workers in the low-paid and insecure urban informal economy.
Our recently conducted pilot study in two villages revealed parallel but overlapping trajectories of households that stay and cope- individuals who migrate and those who return. The presentation will attempt to highlight the vulnerabilities of households both at the point of origin and migrants at the point of destination. While the processes of reverse and cyclical migration are well established in the literature on migration, the case of Sunderbans take on a somewhat different colour. In the context of extreme poverty, rapidly declining and threatened sources of livelihood in the region, what impels migrants to return? What light do these patterns throw on the larger questions of migration and urbanisation in India? Can we think of alternative models of relocation/urbanisation more in tune with local needs and regional development?
About the speaker:
Supriya Roy Chowdhury was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata, and Princeton University. She is currently Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. Earlier she taught at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, IIM Ahmedabad, and worked as Deputy Editor, The Hindu. Her research interests span labour, trade unions, urban poverty, and migration. She has published in the Journal of Development Studies, Third World Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, Economic and Political Weekly, Socialist Register and contributed to several edited volumes. Her book, “City of Shadows: Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore”, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
