Anjali refers to the 2008 flood, which occurred due to a breach in the embankment. This was one of the disasters in the region with the most property damage and loss of life. Besides these acute losses, floods have an ongoing detrimental impact on agricultural livelihoods. The large amounts of silt brought by floodwaters degrade farmland soil.

To deal with lower agricultural productivity, people are diversifying their income sources. Many migrate to different parts of India, especially labor-intensive workplaces, to earn wages. People also find blue-collar jobs in West Asian countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE, as well as Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia.

Unlike other South Asian borders, the India-Nepal border is visa-free. This allows people to work legally in both countries. People of the borderland region have the benefit of migrating to the neighboring country to find resources in times of crisis. A field visit to the India-Nepal border region resulted in some interesting insights. First, if there are enough job opportunities, people prefer to stay in place rather than migrate. Second, men migrate at higher rates, while women stay behind to look after family. Women who stay put contribute economically by rearing cattle or working low-income part-time jobs.

While sea level rise and coastal floods in South Asia receive a lot of attention, flooding from rivers is also a serious natural hazard. As Anjali’s story shows, these floods impact people’s mobility and livelihoods, highlighting the need for proactive policies.

The effects on women are intricately tied with those that men experience, both directly as men lose their ability to support the family and indirectly as women often must provide emotional support for the men in their lives. Because many men typically make a living from fishing and agriculture, they face immediate financial losses from flooding that destroys crops and fisheries. The economic strain can exacerbate stress and family tensions. Men often bear the burden of the labor involved in relocating and rebuilding. which can lead to physical exhaustion and mental stress.

The disruption of their livelihoods can also affect men’s social status and identity within the community. As a man from the region described, “Floods significantly impact our fishing and agricultural activities making us unable to meet our obligations as men. In fishing, the areas we fish in are filled with debris and weeds, making it difficult to catch fish as we used to.”

Children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable during floods. Children may face disruptions in education, as schools are often damaged or closed. The elderly can have mobility challenges, which make it difficult for them to evacuate or access essential services in temporary camps. Both groups are at higher risk of health complications, including malnutrition and disease. About flooding impacts on children and the elderly, an assistant chief said —

“Children face significant challenges during floods. Schools have lost their infrastructure, leading to closures. This has greatly affected children’s education as they miss their daily lessons and struggle to keep up with their studies. Additionally, children are at higher risk of contracting infectious diseases due to poor sanitation in displacement camps. These issues add to the burden on families who are already facing difficult conditions.

“The elderly have faced many challenges during floods and in the camps. Due to mobility issues, they struggle to evacuate from flooded areas to reach temporary camps. This has put them at risk for illnesses and a lack of essential services. Also, they often lack the strength or sufficient support to care for themselves, which increases health risks and affects their overall well-being.”

More than half a million migrant workers from Odisha form the backbone of the dominant textile and diamond industries of Surat. The migration to Surat is a seasonal pattern, where male members of the family migrate to the city at an early age, where they find employment for 6-8 months and spend the rest of the months in the village along with family members. With time, migrant men bring along their wives and kids to Surat, who follow the seasonal pattern as well. While the gains from migration appear to be significant, the costs are substantial, especially at the destination sites. A field visit to Surat and interviews with migrant workers and their family members reveal disturbing facts.

The workers find work in power looms, dying and printing units, coal-fired boilers, and such informal jobs. The work units are dingy concrete halls fitted with heavy machinery, where natural light or ventilation is hard to find. The formal, safe accommodation is hardly available to workers. They manage to find places of residence in dormitories — often known as mess rooms — through caste-based social capital and networks. The mess rooms are in the vicinity of industrial units and are generally bereft of enough light, ventilation, or basic amenities. The square rooms within rickety concrete structures, accommodate 50-80 men, who share spaces between 12-hour shifts.

The hot, humid work units and mess rooms are frustrating sites. They become heat traps during the hot summer days, especially during the heat waves, which are on the rise due to climate change. Lack of cooling and access to water both at the workplace and at the resting places makes life more than miserable for migrant workers. Most of the workers suffer from heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and at times, heat-strokes. The heat causes light-headedness, and dizziness while the humidity-induced sweating causes itchy skin and heat rashes. Many workers complain of sleep deprivation due to worsening heat, which leads to irritability and aggression.

Workers with families live in informal settlements, often away from the industrial units. The shanty colonies consist of smaller residential units, built of concrete walls and asbestos roofs, that house a family of 6-8 people. These houses double up as work units for women in the house who engage in small-scale businesses or outsourced work assignments. The entrepreneurial women offer tiffin service to working men, or put up breakfast stalls, or run tea joints to make ends meet. The cascading effect of increasing heat, lack of basic amenities, and the poor infrastructure of houses exert great pressure on women’s health and productivity. An interaction with Pramila Didi and Heera Ben, entrepreneurial migrant Odiya women in one of the informal settlements in Surat, brought out finer nuances of vulnerability to heat.

Pramila Behera, 50, hails from the Ganjam District of Odisha and runs a breakfast joint near her house between 6 AM to 11 AM. She gets up at 3 AM and starts preparing food from 4 AM onwards. When she gets back home, some rest in the afternoon is indeed important for her. However, the afternoons are very hot and humid in her asbestos-roofed, concrete-walled house, with electricity failures in between. The lack of comfort sets in sleep deprivation, making it far more tiring for her to fetch fresh groceries or continue household chores in the evening. The evenings and nights have become increasingly warmer in recent years, and Pramila Ben experiences fluctuations in blood pressure, a sense of nausea, and general fatigue. The extreme heat in April and May does not allow her to stand at the breakfast joint, so she keeps the shop closed and heads towards her village in Odisha to seek respite. Increasingly hotter summer months mean loss of livelihood and more physical distress for Pramila Ben.

Heera Pradhan, 35, comes from the Ganjam district as well. She runs a tiffin service for working men. She is younger than Pramila Ben but admits that heat leads to indescribable fatigue and tiredness for her. She would have preferred to have far more comfortable clothing during the hot and humid afternoons, but the male gaze around her and traditional beliefs restrain her from wearing comfortable clothing.

Heera’s neighbor Tunni Pradhan, 40, also runs a Tiffin service. The cooking sessions in the afternoons in front of the Chulha and the warmer, humid nights are difficult for her to deal with. She often suffers from headaches, nausea, and skin rashes during the summer months and observes that summer months are getting far harsher with every passing year. Tunni says that the men of the household seek comfort from sleeping outside or on the roof but women do not get the same privilege.

In 2024, India witnessed the worst form of heat waves, which are attributed to the changing climate. Climate change-induced extreme heat is an abstract challenge, and we need to consider it from different perspectives. Sweltering cities and abject lack of heat-resilient basic infrastructure highlighted the increased vulnerability of the urban poor. A closer look at it through a gender lens shows that women are far more vulnerable to extreme heat, at their workplace and their houses. We need to develop a better understanding of vulnerability to extreme heat through a gendered perspective in order to help design better policy responses and create effective heat resilience.