The Invisible Hand Behind India’s Climate Migrant Crisis: Caste as the Silent Architect of Displacement and Dispossession

We may not see it — not yet, at least — but India’s climate crisis is a crisis of caste, too. As climate disasters intensify and displace more communities, the country’s policies continue to treat all displaced people as a monolith, ignoring the deep social hierarchies that shape exposure to risk and capacity for recovery, both.

The term, “climate migrants” refers to people who are forced to move due to climate-related events — be it sudden disasters like floods and cyclones, or slow-onset changes like sea-level rise and salinization. While the climate itself doesn’t discriminate, the fallout from these events does. Caste decides who lives on floodplains and salt-leached soil, who owns land (and can prove it), and who ends up unrecognised in the eyes of the state.

Yet, climate policy in India continues to function as though caste does not exist.

Caste-Blind Policies and Deliberate Dispossession

From government ministries to think tanks and advocacy groups, the environmental policy space is dominated by savarna elites who frame climate vulnerability in caste-neutral terms.

This results in disaster relief and adaptation strategies that ignore the realities of Dalit, Adivasi, and other oppressed communities — people who have historically been denied land, resources, and recognition.

Speaking to The New Humanitarian in 2022, Sangram Mallick, co-founder of Ambedkar Lohia Vichar Manch, an NGO working on caste-based issues, said, “Your caste determines what kind of treatment you will get during a disaster.”

This erasure plays out in disaster relief frameworks too, where compensation and rehabilitation are often tied to formal land ownership, a criterion that systematically excludes Dalit and Adivasi communities, for whom historical landlessness is not an oversight but a result of deliberate, caste-based dispossession.

According to a report funded by the European Commission Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Office, "What assets Dalits do have, such as unregistered fishing boats or nets and make-shift houses without land titles, often go unrecognized as formally owned by them, thereby hiding significant disaster losses. In a serious disaster situation, many Dalits use loans to cope [to] provide for lost homes, food, and medicine, exposing them to a vicious cycle of bonded labor, where whole families can become indentured servants to repay a loan often several times over,” Reuters noted.

In 2019, Dalit journalist Suprakash Majumdar reported the case of Binni Kandi, a woman in Odisha whose mud hut was blown away by Cyclone Fani, and who was, subsequently, denied compensation simply because her home no longer existed, and she had no papers to prove she had ever lived there.

Resettlement programs often displace marginalised communities, offering little more than a token promise of rehabilitation,if at all. “The upper-caste people in the village had us removed [from the shelter] because we are of the Dom caste… Trees had fallen nearby so we took shelter near those. All members of the 25 houses, including the elderly, children and women, had to shelter under these trees. People turned on us, calling us ‘Harijan’ and ‘Doms’,” an article in Scroll quotes Shail Jena, a woman from Biripadia in Odisha, as saying.

These stories are not anomalies. Instead, they reveal a systemic gap between how disaster policies are designed and how disasters are experienced.

A joint study undertaken by the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights and Ambedkar Lohia Vichar Manch in 2019, shows 36% of those turned away from relief shelters in the Puri district of Odisha were Dalits. Without legal land titles or political clout, many are left undocumented, uncared for, and unaccounted for in migration data.

The Sunderbans: A Microcosm of Injustice

The Sundarbans — a cluster of low-lying islands in the Bay of Bengal — illustrate this injustice vividly. Rising sea levels, frequent cyclones and increasing salinity have rendered large swathes of farmland unusable, forcing waves of people — many from marginalized caste groups — to migrate. “Trapped between rising sea levels and the crumbling economy, the delta between India and Bangladesh is set to become the hotspot of climate-induced out-migration in the coming decades,” notes an article in The Swaddle, adding, “Despite millions getting displaced each year, at the policy level, India lacks long-term strategies for managing displacement and migration arising from slow-onset events such as the sea-level rise and coastal erosion.”

The Caste-Capitalist Feedback Loop

In the absence of participatory policymaking, little is expected to improve. Climate migration, as it’s usually discussed, is framed as a tragic but natural outcome of environmental change. What this framing conveniently omits is that migration also benefits someone. Land left behind by displaced farmers is often acquired for industrial, infrastructural, or tourism projects. Urban centers, meanwhile, absorb these migrants into the informal economy, where they become cheap, expendable labor, working dangerous jobs in construction, sanitation, or domestic care.

These are stories of deliberate exploitation, rather than of fateful losses. Climate migration, in this context, is systemic dispossession, enabled by caste-blind governance. It’s not just about who migrates, but who gets to define the migration: who counts as a climate migrant? Whose suffering is visible? Whose voice is heard in policy rooms?

These are political questions that are, right now, being answered by a narrow sliver of society — educated, upper-caste, and urban. This produces a caste-capitalist feedback loop where savarna policy actors see and respond to the crises that affect people like them, while failing to acknowledge the structural violence affecting others.

This dynamic isn’t limited to government institutions; even environmental NGOs have been criticised for replicating these hierarchies, often sidelining Dalit, Adivasi and other marginalised communities in both leadership and agenda-setting, thereby mirroring the same power imbalances they claim to challenge.

A Path to Caste-Conscious Climate Governance

For any climate adaptation strategy to be truly effective, it must account for caste — not just as a checkbox for inclusion, but as a foundational lens through which climate vulnerability is constructed. Adivasi and Dalit communities are not passive recipients of climate impacts; they are active agents with knowledge systems, political demands and ecological relationships that must inform policy design.

We need to move beyond the abstract language of “vulnerability” and towards concrete, caste-conscious climate governance. That means ensuring marginalised voices are not just represented but hold power in environmental decision-making. It means recognising that climate justice is inseparable from caste justice.

Who gets to adapt — and who gets left behind — is never an accident. It is policy. It is power. And in India, it is caste.