Environmental Vulnerability and Women Trafficking: Exploring the Bengal Sundarban Deltaic Region of India

Abstract

Environmental crises are inextricably linked with the development of a region. At the regional level, sustainable human development entirely depends on advantageous physiographic environmental settings, socio-economic conditions, resource availability, resource utilization, livelihood opportunities, and the existence of social ties. But the relentless confrontation of environmental challenges makes a region socio-economically as well as environmentally vulnerable and exacerbates the regional crisis and makes the society highly disorganized. Such regional crises have highly been perceived in the Indian Sundarban deltaic region for its strategic physiographic location and enormous environmental threats. Acute poverty, hunger, malnutrition, starvation become an integral part of this region. Frequent cyclones, monsoon, sea-level rise, and resultant flood and other natural hazardous situations intensify insecurities among the local inhabitants and force people to migrate as ‘climate refugees’ and create room for expanding organize criminal rackets in this region. The present study meticulously analyses how the physical environmental settings of the Indian Sundarban deltaic region continually forces the region to face enormous environmental challenges which result in large-scale resource depletion, limiting livelihood opportunities, weakening existing economy, exacerbate the regional crisis, and eventually make the society disorganized and make people specifically young women and minor girls vulnerable to human trafficking. This study also envisages the already adopted anti-trafficking measures and asking for taking further diversified approaches and policy measures to ensure meaningful climate actions and consequent socio-economic vulnerabilities and break the trafficking rackets from this region.