Women’s Livelihoods in Vulnerable Coastlines

The Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest spanning India and Bangladesh, is a crucial conservation area but also home to millions facing increasing climate threats, including land loss due to coastal erosion. Conservation policies, designed to protect the ecosystem, often overlook the needs of those who live alongside the forests, act as its guardians and depend on it for the subsistence of their households.

Dr. Megnaa Mehtta, a social anthropology lecturer at University College London, researches the intersecting crises of climate, consumption, and conservation and how these impact the daily realities of coastal communities. She focuses on women’s realities—their hardships and their forms of everyday adaptation—as it relates to men’s migration trajectories away from the coastlines of the Sundarbans. Supported by an AXA-UNESCO fellowship, she uses long-term ethnographic research to examine how varied stakeholders and policies implemented by the Forest Department, port authorities, engineers, environmental NGOs, regimes of climate adaptation and local governance have an impact on forest-based livelihoods alongside agrarian distress.  

One strand of her research has interrogated top-down conservation policies and the impact of India’s 1972 Wildlife Protection Act and the ‘Project Tiger,’ on communities who live alongside conservation hotspots such as the Sundarbans.  Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in coastal villages and several shorter visits over a period of seven years, her research highlights the lives of those that are disadvantaged as a result of conservation regimes. She has also argued for activists, NGO workers and mainstream conservation actors to pay attention to traditional forms of resource-use. In the Sundarbans forests, governance is centred on forest deities like Bonobibi and the tiger-demon Dakshin Rai—who alongside Wildlife Protection Laws also enforce a "moral ecology." These demons and deities guide how people harvest forest resources through stories, rituals, and taboos. In a journal article, Dr. Mehtta argues that this system of "nonhuman governance", that is a form of governance through Bonobibi and Dakshin Rai encourages restraint and ecological balance and frowns about greed. Traditional forms of governance, she cautions, can however, in the Sundarbans and other parts of South Asia reinforces caste hierarchies and limit women's freedoms. Nonetheless, she suggests that mainstream conservation laws should pay better attention to these traditional frameworks which would foster better environmental stewardship.

Beyond academic scholarship, Dr. Mehtta’s research has contributed to highlighting the need for environmental litigations on a range of conservation and climate justice issues in the region. Dr. Mehtta collaborates with West Bengal-based NGO DISHA as well as the fishers’ union DMF on an ongoing litigation supporting the lawful right to compensation for women whose husbands have been victims of tiger attacks in the mangrove forest. After years of litigation, Dr. Mehtta’s collaborators—Kolkata-based litigators—have recently won a legal battle for compensation on behalf of three such rural women. More than 6,000 people may have been killed by tigers in the Sundarbans over the past five decades and even today the death-toll, hidden by the Forest Department, ranges from 10-25 people annually.

In collaboration with Delhi and Kolkata-based litigators and The Prameya Foundation, Dr. Mehtta is also working on a litigation that pushes for more stringent rules around the movement of ship vessels on the rivers neighbouring the Sundarbans mangrove forest. These vessels carrying toxic fly ash often capsize in the waters causing incalculable environmental degradation. Their movement is also the cause for land erosion. She emphasizes the need for conservation and climate adaptation regimes to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable coastal communities in addition to the regions’ biodiversity. 

Dr. Mehtta will draw from this work in her upcoming book, Conserving Life: Political Imaginaries from a Submerging Forest, where she highlights the need for more expansive and just forms of conservation.

May 2025

Related Links:

• Opinion Editorial: The Telegraph India online — Ports, ships & a doomed isle

• Opinion Editorial: The India Forum — Counting Tigers, Discounting Victims of Tiger Attacks

• Article: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East — Nonhuman Governance: Care and Violence in South Asian Animism

• Article: Scroll.In — In the cyclone-battered Sundarbans, commercial aquaculture is preying on poverty for profits

• Book review: Economic and Political Weekly — Beyond Climate Reductionism

• Connect with Dr Mehtta: https://x.com/mmehtta