"Rising seas, shifting lives and a test of democratic values", 8 July 2025

Climate change is affecting India’s coastal communities with a deep deep social and economic impact.

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The intensifying impacts of climate change are reshaping India’s coastline resulting in an environmental phenomenon and also profound social and economic rupture. Across the eastern and western seaboards, communities that are historically dependent on agriculture, fishing, and coastal ecosystems are being displaced by rising seas, saltwater intrusion, and the cumulative effects of unregulated development. This has triggered migration, pushing displaced populations into precarious urban labour markets without legal protection or adequate state support.

..Environmental clearances for many projects have overlooked cumulative climate risks, leading to a development model that intensifies ecological and social vulnerabilities. The displaced populations are increasingly getting absorbed into the informal economy as construction workers, brick kiln labourers and domestic workers in urban centres such as Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai. These migration patterns often result in systemic labour exploitation, which include debt bondage (displaced families take wage advances to survive, tying them into exploitative labour conditions); lack of legal protections (informal workers have little or no access to rights under India’s labour laws, such as the Building and Other Construction Workers’ (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996) and gendered exploitation (displaced women entering domestic work face heightened risks of abuse, underpayment, and trafficking).

..The story of displacement is also the story of resilience. Coastal communities, particularly fisherfolk unions and indigenous groups, have resisted ecologically destructive projects with remarkable tenacity. The protests against the Adani ports expansion at Ennore Creek, Tamil Nadu, the Pattuvam Mangrove Protection Movement in Kerala, and the Save Satabhaya campaign in Odisha underscore how grass-roots mobilisations have challenged mainstream development narratives. However, environmental defenders face intimidation, surveillance and criminalisation which are antithetical to India’s constitutional commitment to protect the rights to protest and association..