Sundarbans, the mangrove delta area, which belongs to both India and Bangladesh, is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change. Erratic weather, storms, and the rising seawater have already been contributing to a steady flow of migration from the area to the megacity Kolkata and even cities further away. In 2009, the…
How does the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE), progress in India? Have the RTE Act begun to realize the goals that it set to achieve within a stipulated period? The answers seem to be not so optimistic as far as the education of the children in Sunderbans is concerned.…
This question began to haunt me since a doctoral student who himself is from the Sunderbans told me that the cyclone Aila (2009) had helped their economy to prosper. Hearing this I was stunned. I never imagined that the cyclone Aila, which had devastated the economy of Sunderbans and uprooted thousands of people from their…
I recently traveled to Khulna city and tried to experience life in one of its slums the way locals do through ethnographic research. My specific intention was to learn about the socio-economic lives of the migrants who had left their area of origin due to environmental reasons. During the first few days of my fieldwork,…