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Interviews | Pradyut Bordoloi, Congress parliamentarian who introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill as a private member’s bill, interviewed by Arunabh Saikia (Scroll.in)
Pradyut Bordoloi, Congress parliamentarian who introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill as a private member’s bill, interviewed by Arunabh Saikia (Scroll.in)

Pradyut Bordoloi, Congress parliamentarian who introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill as a private member’s bill, interviewed by Arunabh Saikia (Scroll.in)

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published Published on Dec 20, 2022   modified Modified on Dec 20, 2022

-Scroll.in

An Assam MP explains why he introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill in Lok Sabha.

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, nearly five million Indians were forced to leave their homes because of climate-related events in 2021. While many of these people were displaced temporarily, internal displacement due to climatic conditions stands to be a major challenge for India in the years to come. Rising water levels, according to certain estimates, could affect as many as 36 million people in the coastal areas of just the two states of Bengal and Odisha.

Yet, there has been very little by way of policy intervention except the adoption of the National Action Plan for Climate Change, a document of rather limited scope.

On December 9, Pradyut Bordoloi, a Congress parliamentarian from Assam’s Nagaon introduced the Climate Migrants (Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill as a private member’s bill. While introducing the bill, perhaps the first of its kind, Bordoloi said it sought to “establish an appropriate policy framework for the protection and rehabilitation of internally displaced climate migrants and for all matters connected therewith”.

Scroll.in spoke to Bordoloi about the bill. Here are edited excerpts.

* What were your main motivations behind introducing the bill?

First thing is home-driven observations. A large number of people in Assam live on the chars, or the riverine islands. The Brahmaputra river system is dotted with such islands where mostly people of migrant origin, usually from the minority community, settle down. They settle down, start their cultivation, and build their houses.

Earlier, the life cycle of an established riverine island [till it would get submerged] would be around 20 years. But, of late, in the last 10 years or so, because of the erratic water flow in the Brahmaputra, it’s gone down to four-five years. This is happening because of a variety of reasons, primarily because of environmental degradation, deforestation in the upper reaches, etc. There are also apprehensions that China is diverting water, building dams.

Regardless, the waterflow in the Brahmaputra has become erratic. Earlier, you couldn’t see one bank from another, but now the same river has been reduced to a rivulet for many months of the year. Then suddenly, there’s heavy rainfall and there’s inundation. In short, there is now constant friction on the banks of the Brahmaputra.

So, the inhabitants of the riverine islands become homeless all of a sudden and are forced to move and settle down in forest land, grazing areas, where the law prohibits human settlement. There’s no legal framework to protect these people, so that was one of the main reasons.

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Image Courtesy: Scroll.in
 


Scroll.in, 20 December, 2022, https://scroll.in/article/1040137/interview-you-cant-brush-aside-people-affected-by-climate-change-as-bangladeshi-illegal-migrants


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