By Dr. Aditya Ghosh and Prof. Nibedita S. Ray-Bennett
Between 2020 and 2021, the Indian Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem, was struck by a double disaster: the COVID-19 lockdown and two devastating cyclones, Amphan and Yaas. While mortality from the virus was low due to the region’s remoteness, the compounded crisis triggered an invisible humanitarian emergency. Research conducted between 2024 and 2025 across six police jurisdictions revealed that over 900 people were reported missing in the aftermath, an average of 230 annually. Crucially, 85% of these disappearances were women and young girls.
The Conceptual Gap
Missingness represents a significant blind spot in international policy. The UN Sendai Framework, which guides global disaster response, tracks deaths and economic losses yet ignores disappearances. This leaves a conceptual gap between immediate emergency response and long-term recovery, where the most vulnerable slip through the cracks of institutional oversight.
Drivers of Disappearance
Our research indicates that missingness is not a random byproduct of chaos but a systematic outcome of four intersecting factors:
- Expansion of Trafficking Economies: Disasters create exit fantasies. When livelihoods collapse and homes are destroyed, traffickers pose as suitors or employers, offering escape. Relief centres often become hunting grounds where protection risks intensify due to surveillance failures.
- School Disruptions: The closure of schools removed safe spaces and daily supervision. This led to a surge in dropouts and child marriages. In South 24 Parganas alone, 159 child marriages were reported since 2020; many served as a legal cover for trafficking networks.
- Livelihood Illegality: With agriculture ruined by saltwater, many men turned to illegal crab collection in protected tiger habitats. When these individuals vanish (often due to tiger attacks) families frequently do not report them to avoid prosecution or the denial of compensation. Official records cite 46 tiger deaths, but community accounts suggest the figure is closer to 130.
- Technological Risks: While smartphones are tools for resilience, they have also become instruments for coercion. Encrypted messaging and digital blackmail (using intimate recordings) have made it harder for police to trace trafficking rings.
Redefining Resilience
Current disaster policy focuses on bouncing back. However, the Sundarbans case shows that resilience is often maladaptive. When migration is blocked and relief is delayed, households may adopt perilous survival strategies.
True resilience must be viewed as a social justice process rather than a logistical outcome. A landmark 2024 Calcutta High Court ruling which orders compensation for tiger attack victims regardless of forest boundaries, acknowledges that the state’s failure to provide viable alternatives often forces people into high-risk environments.
Urgent Priorities
To address this crisis, the following changes are essential:
- Formal Tracking: Disappearances must be counted as a distinct humanitarian outcome in the Sendai Framework.
- Integrated Protection: Anti-trafficking protocols must be embedded in disaster relief from day zero.
- Structural Support: Policy must shift toward providing technical skills and secure livelihoods, ensuring that survival does not depend on a single, precarious income source.
In an era of intensifying climate shocks, missingness is a signal that our current frameworks are failing the very people they are designed to protect.
Acknowledgement
Authors thank the Institute for Environmental Futures to fund this project. Thanks, are also due to the respondents and the stakeholders in West Bengal, India. This article is written as part of the Avoidable Deaths Network’s global campaign International Awareness Day for Avoidable Deaths (IAD4AD) marked throughout the month of March. IAD4AD is designed to raise visibility and awareness about indirect disaster deaths and missing persons and the specific causes and circumstances surrounding these deaths.
Authors’ Short Bios
Professor Aditya Ghosh is Science Society Interface Researcher at the Avoidable Deaths Network, Collaborator at the Institute for Environmental Futures and Professor at the Ahmedabad University.
Professor Nibedita Ray-Bennett is the Founding President & Convenor of the Avoidable Deaths Network and Avoidable Deaths Lab, Associate Director at the Institute for Environmental Futures and Professor of Risk Management at the School of Business, University of Leicester.