Climate crisis in Sundarbans makes women vulnerable to trafficking

South 24 Parganas (West Bengal): Kanti was 14 when cyclone Amphan damaged her house in the Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, in West Bengal. Hungry, she was roaming outside her home, expecting food from a nonprofit, when a man with a bag on his back approached her and offered her food and clothes. “I went along. Hardly 10 minutes into the walk, we hopped into his car and I have no memory of what happened after,” till I came to my senses in a brothel, in an unknown city, Kanti, now 18 years-old, tells IndiaSpend.

“I was lying in a small, dirty room when I opened my eyes and I could hear girls talking in a strange language outside. It wasn’t much later that I realised I was brought here for prostitution,” said Kanti, who says she had to do sex work for three years in Pune, before she was rescued by the police during a raid and brought back to her home.

Abject poverty, landlessness, lack of income opportunities, economic exploitation of labour, food insecurity and an insensitive social and cultural environment make people vulnerable to trafficking, as per a 2017 study published in the European Scientific Journal.

Women and children become even more vulnerable because of a “disaster which snatches away their land, house and the few livelihood options that were prevalent in their places of residence forcing them to move out into unknown destinations”, the study found. India is experiencing the impacts of climate change, one of which is stronger storms and cyclones–damaging homes, livelihoods and taking away land.

Deforestation of mangrove forests has led to increased coastal vulnerability for 4.5 million residents of the Indian Sundarban. Between 1891 and 2002, the Sunderbans were hit by 35 cyclones. The region faced 5 cyclones in just 7 years since 2019 (Bulbul and Fani in 2019, Amphan in 2020, Jawad and Yaas in 2021), with the India Meteorological Department reportedly labelling it the cyclone capital of India. A 2006 study by the IMD found that “every five years, about three more cyclones are now forming in the Bay of Bengal during the month of November which is known for the severest cyclones in south Asia”.

Vulnerable to poverty because of these frequent natural disasters, residents of the Sundarbans become easy targets of trafficking, said Nihar Ranjan Raptan, the Founder-Director of Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), a non-governmental organisation working with over 1,000 survivors of trafficking in West Bengal, focusing on the Sundarbans.

“South 24 Parganas is one of India’s poorest districts, prone to climate change impacts. We saw a hike in trafficking complaints post the Covid-19 pandemic, cyclones and the floods,” said the police superintendent of Baruipur Police District.

Trafficking in the garb of employment, marriage

Across India, in 2022, police registered 2,250 cases of human trafficking, with over 6,000 victims. Separately, 83,350 children were reported to be missing, of which 75.5% are girl children.

In 2011, to stem rising crimes of human trafficking against women and children, West Bengal’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) set up a specialised cell, out of the Protection of Women & Children Unit of the CID.

In West Bengal, 67 cases of human trafficking were reported with 78 victims, while 58,871 people were reported missing in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. Of those missing, 12,455 were children.

West Bengal had a conviction rate of 55% in human trafficking cases, as per data from 2022.

Raptan of GGBK said his organisation has assisted the police in rescuing over 3,000 trafficked people, of which 98% were female since 1995.

Sarita (23), who now lives in Rajasthan, was trafficked post Bulbul, the cyclone that hit her village in South 24 Parganas district in the Sunderbans in November 2019. “My father’s field was submerged and we lost all our savings over two months.” Some people from Rajasthan who were visiting the village convinced her parents about employment opportunities, as well as a potential marriage into a well-to-do family, where the groom would have a government job in that state, Sarita said. “Eventually I was taken to Rajasthan and kept in a gloomy, dark room without food for two days. It was near some highway and I was raped by at least four men. Then I was handed over to a family in Bhilwara where I eventually got married in a temple.”0Based on our conversations with the families of trafficking victims and survivors, they were either approached by someone claiming to help them or they were abducted at a young age, in a state of poverty and vulnerability.

Lack of livelihood opportunities, food scarcity and water salinity is making people’s lives difficult, said Raptan. He adds that the locals get no crops for a couple of years after a calamity, such as a cyclone or floods, which brings in saline water from the sea. “Since 2019, there have been three cyclones in the span of one-and-a-half years, worsening the situation and pushing locals towards poverty. Whenever people move towards margins, they would do anything, take any risks to fill their stomach.”

He said that most traffickers want to earn a quick buck without hard work, while some are themselves victims of trafficking. “It is all a nexus, trapping people for marriage, jobs, by showing them giant dreams and luxurious lives. The traffickers have easy access to vulnerable people.”

A survivors’ collective

Over a hundred survivors’, under the Bandhan Mukti Survivors Collective, are trying to spread awareness about human trafficking through camps and sessions in schools, madrasas and community halls of villages. The collective has survivors who were trafficked into states including Rajasthan, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

They are also helping survivors file complaints and pursue cases against traffickers. Rahima, 34, was trafficked while she was returning home from her school in South 24 Parganas. “When I was rescued and brought back, I faced threats from the traffickers but that could not stop me from complaining against them,” Rahima said.

(The writer reports on human rights and environment issues)