Addresses Without Homes

Climate change Is driving mass human displacement and forcing the need to establish climate governance policies that go beyond the traditional perception of who is a refugee”

- Rakhi Bose

ASSAM resident Seher Ali’s life is a paradox. Three decades ago, Ali’s family lost their ancestral home in Charagaon due to a rise in water levels. A river now flows where Ali’s house had once stood. “Our village went underwater. Nothing of the house remains but that is still our official address in many documents,” Ali states.

After 30 years, he still has nothing more than an address without a home. He now lives in a temporary shanty on the outskirts of Niz Baghbar, four kilometres north-east of Baghbar hillock in the (currently flooded) Barpeta district of Assam. This year, the flood situation in Barpeta has left 43,000 people affected. Ali fears that he and his family might once again end up in relief camps where they have spent much of their lives. “We have become like refugees in our own land,” he says. But as per international refugee law, Ali does not qualify to be called a refugee, neither does he get disaster relief-rehabilitation at home. 

Ali is one of the lakhs of people in India who have lost their homes and livelihoods to climate-related phenomena in the past few decades. In 2021 alone, nearly 50 lakh people were internally displaced in India due to climate change and disasters, as per the annual Global Trends Report by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).  

Lost in Terminology