Shifting Lands, Moving People: Livelihood, Migration, Climate Change, And Natural Disasters in The Indian Sundarbans

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Samantak Das (1965-2022) earned his Bachelors, Masters and PhD degrees from the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He worked as a journalist with the World Wildlife Fund before joining the Department of English and Modern European Languages at Visva-Bharati. He then joined the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University in 2005. Throughout his life, he was associated with a wide range of humanitarian activities, including numerous projects to promote livelihood in the Sunderbans. He also served as the Pro-Vice Chancellor at Jadavpur University from 2021-22.

Gautam Gupta has a Bachelors and a Masters in Economics from Jadavpur University and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. He started teaching at the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University in 1991, and retired as Professor in 2018. He has spent this time researching and publishing extensively on Environmental Economics and Experimental Economics.

Sugata Hazra, with a Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D. from the Department of Geology, is a Professor of Coastal Zone Management and former Director of the School of Oceanographic Studies in Jadavpur University. He has worked on the biophysical impacts of climate change on the major ecological hotspots in India including the Sundarbans delta affected by cyclones and rising sea levels. He has led several national and international projects on the Sundarbans and coastal oceans.

The Sundarbans region, nowadays called the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve, is one of the most ecologically sensitive and fragile regions in India. This forested region serves as a buffer between mainland West Bengal and the Bay of Bengal. It is a tidal delta where islands are crisscrossed by mighty rivers and rivulets. Alongside 4.5 million people, it houses a great variety of flora, fauna, and avian species including the large estuarine crocodile and the great Royal Bengal Tiger.

A few years back, Gautam Gupta took on a research project that involved investigating the livelihood choices being made by the people of the Indian Sundarbans and the reasons behind these decisions. It was an indirect way of investigating why such a large population chooses to live in such a hostile place under such hazardous conditions. The study drew on secondary data from numerous government surveys, interviews, and focus group discussions, but mainly relied on a primary household level survey conducted by the present authors that was spread over 19 blocks of the region and extracted data on 2280 households. Gupta was assisted in the project by Samantak Das and Sujit Kumar Mandal. The survey also collected extensive data on migration of three kinds: from places both in and outside the Sundarbans into it, and from the Sundarbans to somewhere else. The survey also had questions about illegal in-migration from Bangladesh. This study forms the backbone of this book.

**Contents and Sample Pages**