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"It is by now a well known fact that unsustainable development projects all across the globe,
especially in the developing countries of the global South, have resulted in various kinds of
environmental hazards like land slides, river-bank erosion, floods and so on and this has
displaced a huge chunk of population, known in the current literature as the ‘environmental
refugees’ from their ancestral homes and traditional livelihoods. In this context, it has to be
kept in mind that all people who are displaced and are termed as ‘environmental refugees’ do
not migrate. The decision to migrate in crisis situations like environmental hazards depends
on a host of institutional and structural factors. Thus, not only the degree of vulnerability of an
individual or a family in crisis situations depends on the institutional and structural factors as
observed by various studies, but the capabilities and opportunities for mobility also depend to
large extent upon these factors. Keeping this in mind, the present paper through an
ethnographic field study in a few erosion-prone villages of the most backward district (in
terms of Gender Development Index and Human Development Index) of the state of West
Bengal in India, namely the Malda district, tries to find out how institutional and structural
factors affect the migration decision of women belonging to various social and economic
groups. The Malda case represents a unique situation of displacement of huge chunk of population,
caused partly by shifting of the course of river Ganga and partly by the construction
of a development project, namely, the Farakka Barrage. The main finding of the study is that
migration in many of the cases, especially for the women-headed household, has often proved
to be an enabling experience. The decision to migrate has often saved these households
from the perils of starvation death caused by loss of cultivable land and other livelihood resources
from the engulfment of the river Ganga." [author's abstract]
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