Those Displaced by Climate, Abandoned by Policy
In the shrinking coastlines of the Sundarbans, fishermen do not return to the delta, for the embankment near their village has breached for the third time in five years. They do not leave because they wanted to, they didn’t have a choice anymore. Amidst coastal erosion, natural disasters, water contamination and saline soil and water, the people of Sundarbans follow what is slowly becoming a familiar route, to move north, to move away into a cluster of tarpaulin and corrugated iron that is called, on no official map, home. There is no government record of why they left. There is no scheme designed for what happens next. India’s climate refugees are no longer a projection. They are already here, here in the jhuggi clusters of Delhi, in the construction sites outside Pune, in the seasonal labour camps that appear and disappear on the edges of cities that have no interest in counting them. They have arrived from the Sundarbans and from Marathwada, from the flood plains of Assam and from the parched interiors of Bundelkhand. What connects these geographies is not merely ecological catastrophe, it is a political economy that has, for decades, extracted from these landscapes without returning to them, and then turned away when the bill arrived in the form of displacement. The Geography of Expulsion The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) recorded 5.4 million displacements in India in 2024, the highest in twelve years. Globally, 99.5 percent of disaster-induced displacements in the same period were linked to climate-related extreme weather. These are not abstract numbers. They correspond to specific embankments that broke, to specific monsoons that did not come, to farms where the borewell went dry and the loan did not get repaid. The Centre for Science and Environment found that India experienced extreme weather events on 314 out of 365 days in 2024, killing nearly 3,000 people and destroying two million hectares of cropland. When land fails, people leave. They do not leave for opportunity; they leave because staying has become impossible. The Slum Is Not a Recovery The health consequences of climate displacement do not begin on arrival. They accumulate from the moment the decision to leave is made; in the weeks of distress migration without food security or medical access, in the physical deterioration of travel undertaken without money. What awaits is a slum. Not metaphorically, literally. Metal-roofed, unplanned, overcrowded, without reliable water or sanitation. A 2024 survey by People’s Courage International found that heat and excess rain are the primary climate stressors facing internal migrants at their destinations, reported by 77 and 59 percent of respondents respectively. The informal settlement is not a place of recovery from ecological disaster; it is a continuation of it by other means. The same bodies that fled waterlogging in the delta now live beside open drains. The same lungs that breathed sea air now breathe particulate matter. There is also the subtler problem of immunological exposure, that is, the transition from a rural disease environment to an urban one, encountering local variants of dengue or typhoid against which origin-area immunity offers little protection. And then there is what researchers are beginning to call solastalgia: the particular grief that comes not from leaving home, but from watching home be destroyed. A 2021 study by researchers at the Central University of South Bihar found that rural communities experiencing climate change in the form of erratic monsoon, heatwave, loss of particular bird and tree species, reported emotional distress, reduced self-worth, and severed cultural and religious practices as direct consequences. This is not sentiment. A 2025 scoping review in BMJ Mental Health found consistent associations between solastalgia and depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The quiet epidemic in India’s climate settlements is not only physical. The Architecture of Exclusion India’s welfare architecture is territorial. Its benefits are tied to addresses, to ration cards registered in districts that the migrant has left, to identity documents that prove belonging to a place they may never return to. When they move, the entitlements do not follow. Meanwhile, less than five percent of India’s total climate budget is allocated to relocation or livelihood diversification, the very interventions that would address displacement before it becomes a health crisis. Only 35 percent of urban local bodies meet the AMRUT water supply benchmarks. The cities receiving millions of climate migrants are not equipped to receive them, and the national budget has not decided that equipping them is a priority. The Fix Exist, The Will Does Not! The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) noted in 2025 that migrants drive India’s development but are systematically excluded from programs designed to prevent climate-induced shocks. This is not an administrative oversight. It is a consequence of treating migrants as labour inputs rather than as citizens with rights that travel with them. A genuine response requires portability that actually functions; health entitlements, ration access and social security across state lines, without a bureaucratic queue. It requires primary care in informal settlements that do not ask for a local address. It requires legal recognition that climate displacement is a category of harm distinct from economic migration. There are approximately 14 million people living in internal displacement in India today, according to the IDMC, without Ayushman Bharat coverage in the cities where they now live, without legal recognition as displaced persons, without recourse if the corrugated iron roofs they sleep under give them heatstroke in May. They are a present political and environmental protection failure. More will arrive with every monsoon season that does not come, every summer that runs past what the land can hold. The question is not whether the state will face this. It already is. The question is whether it will choose to see it.