Chapter 7 - Climate-change induced out-migration and resultant women empowerment: Glimpses of resilience from Indian Sundarbans

Abstract

This chapter tries to inquire into the role of migration in shaping up left behind women's life in the Indian Sundarbans. Being ecologically and economically vulnerable, women of the Sundarban region are pushed into the workspace due to increasing male migration, who in turn gradually becomes homeless. The migration of the male counterparts, within the country or overseas, gets amplified as the region faced cyclone strikes, tidal surge, embankment breaching. The left behind women, by working in the agriculture, pisciculture, and negotiating with the outside world, gained confidence to deal with the situation and became the bread-winner for the family in the absence of their husbands. Therefore, this study intends to show if this participation has made them truly empowered or if they faced more adversities or it is only a cosmetic change in the social fabric. This study relied on secondary sources like reports, policy documents, and primary survey. For the primary survey, 50 male migrant laborers and 150 left behind wives from selected villages of Gosaba Community Development Block based on purposive and snowball sampling techniques have been purposively chosen to lend credence to the empirical evidence as the villages though contiguous have diverse traits in terms of socioeconomic backwardness, vulnerability to natural calamities, and risks to the livelihood of those areas. Data was gathered on demographic parameters, remittances, nature of work participation of women, and women's empowerment in terms of decision-making power. The findings of this study show that agricultural productivity has decreased with the increasing out-migration and highlights how remittances lowered the household poverty. Though migration helped to cope with economic distress, improved the financial condition and empowered women yet it created a shortage of labor availability and the wage rates increased manifold, apart from leading to “unhoming” of the male members.