Intersecting Inequalities: Climate Induced Migration and its Effects on Women Farmers and Agricultural Workers in India

This report reveals a side of agrarian distress that climate policy has largely failed to see: the movement, and forced immobility, of women farmers and agricultural workers under slow-onset climate stress. Focusing on Maharashtra, Telangana, and Punjab, it argues that migration should be read not just as an economic side-effect but as a climate reality shaped by drought, rainfall variability, and groundwater depletion. Migration is a phenomenon that current adaptation frameworks are structurally unequipped to address. The report’s comparative review of State Action Plans on Climate Change finds them technocratic and largely silent on migration, gender, or caste, even in states where seasonal labour flows are well documented.

Migration, when considered, is largely restricted to a development or labour concern and not a legitimate climate-adaptation strategy which must be incorporated into climate-related policy frameworks. Striking evidence comes from sugarcane producing areas like the Beed district in Marathawada, where landless and Dalit women migrate for cane-cutting due to environmental stressors. They often face debt bondage, exploitative piece-rate labour, and several reproductive injustices to avoid losing wages to menstrual/post-natal/childcare leave. The report also traces how migration, driven by the climate crisis, intersects with child marriage, interrupted education, and gender-based violence, and closes with recommendations for embedding human mobility (movement of populations across geographies and labour landscapes as a distress-coping strategy), gender justice, and social protection into national and state climate governance. Grounded in field data (surveys from Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch, The Energy and Resources Institute) and policy-document analysis, this report considers migration as a gendered, caste-inflected site of vulnerability demanding an institutional response.