The Sundarbans, home to one of India's most climate-vulnerable coastal communities, sits at the intersection of three crises: climate change, gendered vulnerability, and human trafficking. As rising sea levels swallow islands, cyclones intensify, and traditional livelihoods collapse, women and girls in this region bear a disproportionate share of the burden  and face acute risks that extend far beyond economic loss.

This article examines how climate-induced livelihood collapse and displacement in the Sundarbans heightens women's exposure to trafficking, and evaluates the critical gaps in India's policy frameworks that leave them without adequate protection. 

Gendered Vulnerability in Coastal Communities

In the coastal communities, women's vulnerability is distinctly shaped by their position in both the household and the economy. They are an integral part of the fisheries (Kashyap et al., 2019) sector, and participate in both paid and unpaid labour across the sector: seed collection, sorting, post-harvest processing, and door-to-door marketing yet remain marginalised from household decision-making  (Kowshik, 2025). This lack of agency means that when climate shocks strike, women have little control over how the household responds, and even fewer options available to them individually. During extreme weather events, women face greater loss of workdays (Fruttero et al., 2023) as they are constrained by the double burden of domestic responsibilities and rigid social norms that restrict mobility and limit access to work outside their immediate community. 

Women engaged in post-harvest activities are exposed to occupational hazards. 48% of fisherwomen (Giri, 2025) in the region suffer from chronic back pain or joint issues, and only 22% have access to public health facilities. These occupational risks, compounded by unhygienic conditions, inadequate water access, and poor sanitation, taken together, constitute a compounding cycle of vulnerability that climate stress significantly accelerates. 

Climate Change Impacts on the Sundarbans

The Sundarbans act as a nursery to over 90% of aquatic species in eastern India's coastal fishery (Chandra & Sagar, 2003), while facing accelerating threats from rising sea levels, intensifying cyclones, and salinity intrusion.

Between 2015-2016, the total area of the Sundarbans shrank considerably due to rising sea levels, and it is predicted that some islands may soon submerge. Salination of soil threatens agriculture and destroys crops , this increases their risk of food insecurity (Zero Carbon Analytics, 2022). The collapse of agriculture due to salinity forces many of the women into fishing, requiring them to stand in saline water for four to six hours daily, with severe consequences for their reproductive health, including recurring UTIs, menstrual irregularities, vaginal infections, and in some cases, even miscarriages (Athar, 2022). Saline water intrusion further contaminates freshwater sources, forcing women to travel greater distances to collect clean water adding to their physical burden while increasing exposure to waterborne disease (Karmakar, 2022). Poor public infrastructure, a lack of reliable electricity, healthcare, and education, leaves boat-dependent and forest-dependent livelihoods without a safety net (Tripathy & Paul, 2024). For women, this gap is particularly acute: with limited access to healthcare facilities, reproductive health conditions go untreated and worsen over time (Athar, 2022).

These pressures significantly reduce the coping capacity of households, making migration an increasingly necessary strategy.

Migration and Trafficking: Climate-Induced Risks

A study shows that approximately1.5 million people will have to permanently relocate outside the Sunderbans due to the rising sea levels. In such cases, families are deprived of their traditional livelihoods and seek opportunities in areas that are alien to them. Over the past 25 years, islands like Bedford, Lohachara, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga have already submerged, displacing around 6000 families.

The gendered nature of this risk is stark: of over 3,000 people rescued from trafficking by Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), a local NGO since 1995, 98% were female (Kumar, 2024). The police superintendent of Baruipur district further confirmed a sharp rise in trafficking complaints following cyclones, floods, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anima, a 13-year-old girl from the Sundarbans, was lured into a false romantic relationship and trafficked to Bihar, where she endured severe abuse before eventually escaping (Ellis-Petersen & Khan, 2023). Her case exemplifies how poverty, limited mobility, and manipulation by various actors from intimate partners to traffickers render women and children vulnerable to violence at every stage of migration.

Policy Gaps & Institutional Challenges

The Disaster Management Act, 2005, establishes India's framework for disaster prevention, mitigation and response, yet contains no explicit provisions for women, nor does it recognise trafficking as a disaster-linked crime (Dutta, 2017). It has been estimated by WHO that women and children are particularly affected by disasters, accounting for more than 75% of the displaced persons (Dutta, 2017). The Act's centralised, top-down approach further limits its effectiveness, as it does not incorporate contextual insights from local communities, the very communities that first identify risks like suspicious recruitment or sudden disappearance of women and girls following climate shocks (Hanspal & Behera, 2024). 

The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1986, remains the primary legislation addressing trafficking in India, yet its scope is critically narrow. By focusing almost exclusively on brothel-based sex work, it fails to capture the diverse forms of trafficking experienced by climate-displaced women (Bhatty, 2017). Most significantly, the Act contains no recognition of climate-induced displacement as a structural driver of trafficking vulnerability. This narrow legislative focus reflects an incomplete effort at understanding the broader social and structural problem of trafficking. 

India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) acknowledges that women face heightened climate risks including water scarcity, reduced forest biomass, and health vulnerabilities  but stops short of a structured plan of action (Singh, 2017). Even when gender was mentioned, the understanding of it was at a superficial level, assuming women to be a homogeneous group. The policy does not take into account the intersectional vulnerabilities from the perspective of caste, class and religion, which play a huge role in the ability to cope with any stressor. A study from Uttarakhand illustrates this starkly: a government water supply project placed within temple premises effectively excluded Dalit women, who were barred by caste-based discrimination from accessing it  forcing them to collect water covertly at night (Joshi, 2011). In the Sundarbans, where coastal women, and tribal groups face overlapping vulnerabilities, climate adaptation policies that ignore intersectionality actively deepen existing inequalities, leaving the most marginalised women further behind.

Despite being a signatory to the UN Sendai Framework, India has no legal category for climate refugees. Marginalised groups  particularly Dalit and Adivasi populations  are routinely denied rehabilitation due to a lack of legal documents or land titles (Bhardwaj & Siddiqui, 2025). For women, this invisibility is especially dangerous without legal standing, displaced women have no access to state protection, heightening their vulnerability to traffickers. The Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2022 sought to address this gap but remains unpassed.

Way Forward: Breaking the Chain of Vulnerability

• Strengthen Climate Resilience Through Gender-Sensitive Livelihood Diversification:  Climate adaptation programmes must actively address the specific barriers women face in accessing alternative livelihoods: restricted mobility, exclusion from skill-building and training opportunities, and limited access to institutional credit. Interventions should prioritise women-led entrepreneurship. Reducing livelihood precarity among women is the single most effective way to reduce forced migration  and therefore trafficking risk  in climate-vulnerable communities.

• Reform DMA to include gender-responsive and anti-trafficking protocols: The Disaster Management Act, 2005 must be amended to explicitly recognise women's differentiated vulnerability during disasters. This includes mandating gender-disaggregated data collection in disaster assessments, integrating anti-trafficking protocols into disaster response plans, and requiring women's representation in decision-making bodies at the National, State,  District and village levels. Decentralising disaster governance to include community-based vigilance groups , particularly in cyclone-prone coastal areas would enable faster identification of trafficking risks, such as suspicious recruitment activity or sudden disappearance of women and girls following climate shocks.

• Expand ITPA's Definition to Capture Climate-Linked Trafficking: The ITPA needs to identify trafficking as a broader concept that includes labour exploitation, sexual exploitation occurring outside brothel settings and also non sexual coercion that leads to trafficking.  Accountability must extend to all actors in the trafficking chain, not just those operating at the site of exploitation. Additionally, victim identification protocols should be gender-sensitive, recognising that many women do not self-identify as trafficking victims, particularly when trafficked through marriage or employment.

• Centre Women in Disaster Planning and Community Resilience Mechanisms: Women in climate-vulnerable communities must be actively involved in disaster risk assessment, planning, and monitoring. Their local ecological knowledge, informal early-warning practices, and social awareness of trafficking risks  such as suspicious recruitment patterns or sudden disappearance of women following climate shocks are invaluable and currently untapped. This requires ensuring women's meaningful representation in community-based disaster committees, creating safe and accessible channels for women to report trafficking risks, and investing in women-led community vigilance networks in cyclone-prone areas like the Sundarbans.

• Establish Legal Recognition and Documentation for Women Climate Refugees: India must urgently develop a legal framework recognising climate-induced displacement, beginning with passing the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2022. Within this framework, particular attention must be paid to women  who are disproportionately undocumented, and therefore denied access to rehabilitation, welfare schemes, and legal protection. Legal invisibility for displaced women,  is a direct pathway to exploitation and trafficking. Dedicated documentation drives in climate-vulnerable regions, designed specifically to reach women, must be integrated into disaster preparedness planning.

• Build Gender-Sensitive Cross-Sector Coordination and Scale Ground-Level Models: Effective response to climate-induced trafficking requires coordinated action across disaster management, anti-trafficking, and women and child development departments with women's voices embedded at every level. Organisations like GGBK, which have rescued over 3,000 trafficking survivors, 98% women , demonstrate what ground-level, gender-responsive intervention looks like (Kumar, 2024). Their model of community-based prevention, survivor-led awareness, and legal support should be assessed for replication across other climate-vulnerable coastal regions.

Addressing the intersecting crises of climate change, livelihood collapse, and trafficking requires more than siloed policy responses. Women in communities like the Sundarbans are being failed simultaneously by disaster governance, anti-trafficking legislation, and climate adaptation frameworks. Meaningful change demands that gender is not an afterthought in climate policy but its organizing principle.

References:

• Kashyap, A., Chutia, S. J., Yashwanth, B. S., Sainary, B., & Goswami, K. K. (2019). Gender issues in the fisheries sector of India [Unpublished manuscript]. ICAR–Central Institute of Fisheries Education. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337758849_GENDER_ISSUES_IN_FISHERIES_SECTOR_OF_INDIA

• Kowshik, P. (2025, February 3). Fisherwomen ride the rough waves while India’s blue economy blooms. Mongabay India.https://india.mongabay.com/2025/02/fisherwomen-ride-the-rough-waves-while-indias-blue-economy-blooms/

• Chandra, G., & Sagar, R. L. (2003, December). Fisheries in Sundarbans: Problems and prospects. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2084014

• Karmakar, S. (2022). Climate change and everyday-life: Negotiation of women in the Sundarbans, India.Man, Environment and Society, 3(1).https://www.arfjournals.com/image/catalog/Journals%20Papers/MES/2022/No%201%20(2022)/4_Subarna%20Karmakar.pdf

• Zero Carbon Analytics. (2022, November 8). Loss and damage in the Sundarbans. Zero Carbon Analytics.https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/policy/loss-and-damage-in-the-sundarbans/

• Ellis-Petersen, S., & Khan, M. (2023, June 13). ‘I trusted him’: human trafficking surges in cyclone-hit east India. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/13/i-trusted-him-human-trafficking-surges-in-cyclone-hit-east-india

• Dutta, M. (2017). Natural disaster and vulnerability to trafficking of women and girls in India. European Scientific Journal, Special Edition. https://files.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/236411044.pdf#:~:text=neither%20mentions%20anything%20about%20special%20needs

• Bhatty, K. (2017, November). A review of the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1986. https://cprindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/A-Review-of-the-Immoral-Traffic-Prevention-Act-1986_Final-Edit.pdf#:~:text=lack%20of%20a%20definition%20of%20trafficking

• Navya, V., Sumit, K., & Tiwari, R. R. (2023). Occupational injuries among female seafood processing workers in Prakasam district, Andhra Pradesh, India. Women & Health, 63(1), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/03630242.2022.2158416

• Singh, A. (2017). Women in National Action Plan for Climate Change of India. Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(5), 497–501. https://doi.org/10.36347/sjahss.2017.v05i05.012

• Tripathy, B., & Paul, A. K. (2024). A study on problems of fishing communities in Sundarban region of India. Alochna Journal, 13(2). https://alochana.org/wp-content/uploads/15-AJ2043.pdf

• Hanspal, M. S., & Behera, B. (2024). The Disaster Management Act, 2005: A critical review. DME Journal of Law, 5(1), 42–53.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4920160

• Fruttero, A., Halim, D., Broccolini, C., Coelho, B., Gninafon, H., & Muller, N. (2023). Gendered impacts of climate change: Evidence from weather shocks (Policy Research Working Paper No. 10442). World Bank Group.https://wrd.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/WB-gendered-impacts-climate-change.pdf

• Athar, U. (2022, September 24). Climate, salinity, menstrual health: Sundarban women fight on three fronts. The Wire Science.https://science.thewire.in/politics/rights/sundarban-women-salinity-menstrual-health/

• Kumar, D. (2024, October 11). Climate crisis in the Sundarbans makes women vulnerable to trafficking. IndiaSpend.https://www.indiaspend.com/climate-change/climate-crisis-in-the-sundarbans-makes-women-vulnerable-to-trafficking-927311/

• Joshi, D. (2011). Caste, gender and the rhetoric of reform in India’s drinking water sector. Economic & Political Weekly, 46(18), 56–63.

• Bhardwaj, C., & Siddiqui, N. (2025, October 15). Climate mobility in India: A confused understanding of climate refugees, displacement and mobility. Refugee Law Initiative Blog.https://rli.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/10/15/climate-mobility-in-india-a-confused-understanding-of-climate-refugees-displacement-and-mobility/

• Giri, P. (2025). Life and livelihood of women in the Sundarbans: A survey. International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation. https://doi.org/10.51244/IJRSI.2025.121000036