Missing Persons Project
By Dr Aditya Ghosh
Disasters induced by climatic changes are producing social and economic stress of unprecedented complexity and scale across vulnerable regions. Apart from direct losses and damages resulting from these disasters, there are acute social impacts of disasters that remain largely invisible. Disasters interact with socioeconomic vulnerabilities, and power struggles across scales encompassing gender, policy actors, institutions, communities, and other stakeholders in the short and longer temporal scales. There is strong evidence worldwide that women and children suffer the worst impacts of disasters, especially material, mental and physical stress. However, there is considerable obscurity about the extent, entanglements, and outcomes of these impacts and how it leads to acts of disappearance of many people in post-disaster scenarios.
This study, funded by the Institute for Environmental Futures seed fund, focuses on persons who ‘go missing’ within the temporal space of zero days to six months after a disaster event. These missing persons include children, young adults, and women and men of different ages.
Data was collected from the Indian Sundarbans from May to July 2024 from six police station areas covering the period 2020-2024. During this period, three specific disasters took place: COVID-19 and two severe cyclonic storms, Amphan and Yaas.
The preliminary findings suggest (2020-2024) that over 900 people went missing from six police station areas in the Sundarbans, an average of 230 a year, with about 85% being women or young girls. Six different reasons were identified for missing, including fake marriages, marriage promises, blackmailing, kidnapping, and trafficking, fake trafficking, and child labour.
Another key reason behind the sudden increase in disappearances, especially among men, was the growing dependence on the forest commons during the double disasters. A large number of coastal inhabitants were forced to access crabs and honey that offered to compensate the compounded impacts of loss of main livelihoods practices and inability to migrate. However, Sundarbans National Park is a protected area that does not allow any legal access to this nontimber forest produce (NTFP). Those who ventured into the forest did so illegally and were liable for prosecution. So, despite having gone missing, the families did not register a missing diary nor seek institutional help to search for them. Many of those who went to the forest and were untraceable were found dead later in the forests by community groups. These deaths resulted from tiger and crocodile attacks. The official figure of tiger attacks was about 46 between 2020 and 2024, but local accounts and experiences during the fieldwork put this number much higher, more than 130, in fact, more than 30 a year on average.
Families and the community were heavily discouraged from lodging missing diaries in such cases because accessing the forest was illegal in the first instance. These missing people constituted underreported and represented in the official missing person data. The law does not allow compensation for attacks in protected areas.
The data analysis is ongoing, and the findings will be published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2025.