19 Environmental Refugees and Environmental Distress Migration as a
Security Challenge for India and Bangladesh
Imtiaz Ahmed
19.1 Introduction
People move, but not always voluntarily. Involuntary
movement of people, particularly across national bor-
ders and for reasons of political, religious, racial or
ethnic persecution, is what constitutes a refugee pop-
ulation. Currently, the UNHCR figure shows that
there are 9.2 million refugees, although the total ‘pop-
ulation of concern’ to UNHCR totals over 19 million,
and this in addition to refugees includes asylum-seek-
ers, returnees, internally displaced persons, and state-
less people (UNHCR 2005: 2). This figure however
does not include the people who have been uprooted
for environmental causes and have ended up having a
fate similar to those of conventional refugees. Critics
maintain that there are 25 million people worldwide
who have been uprooted for environmental reasons,
that is, from floods, toxic spills, desertification, hydro-
electric projects, soil erosion, land degradation, and
other environment related disruptions (Myers 1993;
Raina/Chowdhury/Chowdhury 1997; Baker 2001).
The latter figure is evidently higher than that for con-
ventional refugees. And it is this group of people – up-
rooted and impoverished or as Essam El-Hinnawi
maintains, ‘those who had to leave their habitat, tem-
porarily or permanently, because of a potential envi-
ronmental hazard or disruption in their life-support-
ing ecosystems’ – who have earned the dubious dis-
tinction of being called ‘environmental refugees’ (El-
Hinnawi 1985). The plight of such refugees, particu-
larly with respect to their birth in Bangladesh and
later on their crossing over to India, and the subse-
quent security challenges they pose for both India and
Bangladesh, is what we intend to highlight in this
chapter.
The chapter is divided into eight sections. Section
one is the introduction (19.1). Section two addresses
the meaning of environmental refugees, more specifi-
cally how they are different from migrants and con-
ventional refugees (19.2). Section three reflects on the
issue of distress migration from Bangladesh to India,
focusing particularly on the so-called ‘illegal’ flow of
people (19.3). The environmental problems faced by
Bangladesh and how they contribute to distress mi-
gration, including the flow of environmental refugees
across the border, will be highlighted in section four
(19.4). Section five will take up the fate of environ-
mental refugees as ‘stateless persons’, particularly in
the backdrop of the fact that both Bangladesh and In-
dia tend to disown them as citizens of their respective
countries (19.5). Section six will then take up the issue
of India’s policy of fencing or barbed wiring the bor-
ders to stop the flow of what it regards as ‘illegal’ mi-
grants from Bangladesh (19.6). The issue of what is to
be done will be taken up in section seven, while the
final section will include some concluding remarks
(19.7 and 19.8 respectively).
19.2 Conceptualizing Environmental
Refugees
Floods, famines, and large families combine and cre-
ate an environment not conducive to the sound and
sustainable habitability of human life and living. But
the gap between such direct ecological factors (save,
of course, the issue of large families) and the
consequences of modern development is not that
great. There is a growing literature which suggests
that many of the environmental problems that we are
now facing have resulted from man-made structures
(Jacobson 1988; Durning 1989; Renner 1989; Shiva
1989; Kritz 1990; BMU 2002; Brauch 2002; Simms
2003). Even in the case of acts of God, like floods and
droughts, often the dire consequences are the result
of crude human exploitation of nature. Put differ-
ently, modern (mal) development often leads to envi-
ronmental insecurity. The latter could be further di-
vided into three. The first is the lack of ‘water
security,’ or more precisely, the lack of having fresh
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water, which results from the drying up of rivers and
waterbeds, although at times it could result from ex-
cessive flood waters and water logging, including sea
level rise from global warming (Pielou 1998; Ahmed
1999a; Brauch 2002; Brown 2004).1 Often the lack of
water security leads to conflicts or ‘water wars’ (de
Villiers 1999; Shiva 2002). The second is the want of
‘land security’, related directly to the degradation of
soil and the incapacity of the population to harvest
any further. The last one is the lack of ‘food security,’
arising partly from a combination of water and land
insecurities, and partly from the excessive growth of
population and lack of employment (Sen 1981; Dreze/
Sen/Hussain 1995; Brown 1998). If the country is
small in size, the situation becomes even more precar-
ious because the victims cannot move to other parts
of the country. Consequently, they end up becoming
‘environmental refugees’ in neighbouring states,
which often leads to conflicts not only between the
sending and receiving states but also between the peo-
ple of the receiving state and those who have joined
them as environmental refugees.
Environmental refugees often carry the burden
that is otherwise implied in the word ‘refugee’. In
fact, once the victims, whether arising from political
persecution or environmental insecurity, become refu-
gees there is no way to distinguish the actual experi-
ence that they go through. All of them in reality live a
life of a refugee, that is, in constant fear, uncertainty,
and immense poverty. Moreover, if the victims are
compelled to leave their original habitation for rea-
sons of land or food insecurities, it becomes almost
impossible for them to return to their home unless ef-
fective measures are taken to ensure their survivability.
In such a situation, ‘the compulsions to flee’, ‘fear to
return’, or even ‘crossing international borders’ – the
existing international criteria for becoming a refugee
– remain no less pressing factors for the birth and
growth of environmental refugees.
Environmental refugees, however, differ from mi-
grants or migratory trends normally found in history.
The UNHCR is also clear on this:
Millions of people have been forced to leave their
homes because the land on which they live has become
uninhabitable or is no longer able to support them. ...
The terminology for describing environmentally in-
1 In the case of Bangladesh there is a gruesome predic-
tion that 17 % of its land will disappear by 2100 because
the sea level would in all probability rise by a metre as a
result of global warming, giving rise to even greater
water insecurity. See: Brauch (2002).
Imtiaz Ahmed
duced migration is controversial. For many observers,
‘migration’ does not convey the fact that the people af-
fected are forcibly uprooted. To call them refugees
seems to convey more accurately that they left their
homes involuntarily, for reasons not of their own choos-
ing (UNHCR 1993; Black 2001).
But then some continue to use ‘migrants’ and ‘refu-
gees’ interchangeably. There is, however, a need to
maintain the distinction between the two lest the
term ‘refugee’ be diluted and made economistic and
taken to mean some historical patterns of population
movement. In fact, the UN Convention on the Protec-
tion of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their
Families is quite precise in its definition of migrant
worker: “a person who is to be engaged or has been
engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which
he or she is not a national” (Pkhakadze 2005: 67). Just
as precise is the definition provided by the UN De-
partment of Economic and Social Affairs: “A person
who moves to a country other than that of his or her
usual residence for a period of at least a year (12
months), so that the country of destination effectively
becomes his or her new country of usual residence.
From the perspective of the country of departure the
person will be a long-term emigrant and from that of
the country of arrival the person will be a long-term
immigrant” (Pkhakadze 2005: 67). There is, indeed,
no sense of involuntariness on the part of the person
in both these definitions, which is otherwise a critical
marker for a ‘refugee’. In the case of environmental
refugees the involuntariness arises not from political
persecution, as would be the case with conventional
refugees, but from environmental disruptions, includ-
ing man-made (mal) developmental interventions and
structures. There is also a need to distinguish between
‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ migrants. While the former stands
for those who had crossed the border with valid doc-
uments, the latter generally refers to those who had ei-
ther crossed the border without valid documents or
were previously legal migrants but have now ‘over-
stayed’ the period for which valid documents were is-
sued to them.2 Problems however arise when there is
no legal migration regime, not even provisions for
work permit or options for changing citizenship be-
2 One good example of ‘legal’ migrants would be the
Bangladeshi workers, now numbering more than a mil-
lion, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, and
North America. The ‘overstayers’ (that is, following the
lapse of the period for which valid documents for tem-
porary residency and work permit were issued) would
fall into the category of ‘illegal’ migrants, the discussion
of which however is beyond the scope of this chapter.