‘When the climate pushes people out: Why India needs a law for the displaced’

Climate change is no longer an abstract debate about rising temperatures or melting glaciers. It has entered the lives of ordinary people in ways that are immediate, disruptive, and often irreversible. Across India, people are packing their belongings not because they want to but because they have no choice.

- ROMIL ARYAN AND RITUL ARYAN

They are leaving because their land no longer supports crops, because the river that sustained them has swallowed their homes, because a cyclone keeps returning every other year, or because the heat outside their doorstep has become unbearable. The idea of climate migration may sound like something from the distant future, but for millions, it is already happening.

What is alarming is not just the scale of this movement, but the fact that it is unfolding in the shadows of our legal and policy systems. India has no law, no policy, and not even a working definition for climate-displaced people. In the absence of a framework, those who are forced to move find themselves unprotected, uncounted, and largely invisible.

THE LANDSCAPES WE ARE LOSING

Nowhere is this crisis more visible than in regions already stretched by environmental stress. The Sundarbans offer a sobering example. Rising sea levels and increasingly powerful cyclones have swallowed villages, salinized farmland, and pushed thousands inland. Families who once had stable livelihoods— fishing, farming, forest collection—now drift between informal labour, relief camps, and uncertain resettlement. Their movement is not planned, not supported, and not officially recognised.

In Bundelkhand, long-term droughts have intensified over the last decade, forcing entire families to migrate seasonally to cities for work. The pattern is cyclical but increasingly permanent. Heatwaves have made large parts of central India difficult to live for weeks each summer. Assam’s riverine communities face an annual cycle of erosion and flood that pushes them farther from their ancestral lands. Himalayan regions confront landslides and glacial lake outbursts, risks magnified by warming temperatures.