COP21 : What can it do for Rina - a climate change refugee?

21st UNFCCC Conference of the Parties or COP21 has just begun. Its THE most important climate summit of our lifetime where we expect the world to strike a climate deal - one that will be "gender responsive". On the occasion, I am running a 2-week blog campaign, connecting the dots among COP21, Climate Change and Gender

 Rina Dash is an undocumented migrant worker in New Delhi. In 2008, she came here from Satkhira district of Bangladesh. There was a cyclone she says, and it destroyed her home and flooded her little farm she says. It was super cyclone Sidr, I learned - a disaster that killed over 3000 people.

After the flood water went down, nothing could be grown on the far, says Rina. So, her husband suggested that they migrate to New Delhi . 

Why Delhi? "Because we heard thee was plenty of jobs."
But when they came here, her husband found a job of a rickshaw puller. Rina, when I met her, was a janitor. She was paid as  a daily wager. They live in a juggi - a shack made of tarpaulin sheet.

Memories of a climate refugee: Rina shows the photos of her relatives who died in the cyclone. She requested me not to show her face as this could lead to her deportation as an illegal migrant

Across New Delhi, there are thousands of  undocumented migrant workers like Rina

Migration: Prevention Is Always Better than Cure

It is International Migrants day and since morning, a series of faces have been passing before my eyes. These are faces of women whom I have met in recent times and found, they were all victims of climate change. It affected each of them in a different way, but at the end of the day, uprooted them from their homes and turned them into migrants with an uncertain future.

Let me share the stories of five of them.

Akshaya, Hyderabad - Migrant, because there was no WATER.

Akshaya Gaud is 24 and a commercial sex worker. She migrated from Adilabad - a district  in Andhra Pradesh state of southern India that has been severely affected by consecutive droughts. Akshaya migrated 2 years ago to Hyderabad because there was no water. All the ponds dried and ground water level depleted so much, borewells could not produce any water. When I interviewed her for my story 'Drought drives rural Indian women into city sex trade' , she said this: “The last time I visited my home, there was hardly enough water to drink. When I returned, I brought back a bundle of unwashed clothes with me because there was no water to wash them. How can we live like this?”