In Sarh village in Reasi district of Indian-administered Kashmir, a landslide occurred on September 2 when Shabir Ahmad’s home was sucked into the river after persistent rains caused a mudslide.
“I had been building my house brick by brick since 2016. It was the work of my life. The 36-year-old father of three children told Al Jazeera, “I finished building the second floor, and there is nothing now.
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As dozens of families helplessly watched their farmlands, shops, and other properties worth millions of rupees vanish without a trace, Ahmad’s was one of the nearly 20 houses in Sarh that night, including one belonging to his brother.
“We don’t even have one inch of land left to stand on”, said Ahmad from a government school in Sarh, where his family and other villagers were sheltering after the deluge.
The tragedy at Sarh was just one of many more severe climate disasters that have claimed the lives of millions of people and left them in a future uncertain future.
According to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), climate-related disasters forced more than 32 million people from their homes in India between 2015 and 2024, with 5.4 million displacements recorded in 2024 alone – the highest in 12 years. With China and the Philippines as the top two countries in the list, India is one of the three that were the most affected by internal displacements during that time.
In addition, over 160, 000 people were forced to flee across India during the first six months of 2025 as a result of natural disasters, which caused significant flooding and landslides and submerged hundreds of villages and cities.
Zero adaptation money for two years
The Indian Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change established a National Adaptation Fund on Climate Change (NAFCC) in 2015 to assist millions of people in India who are particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis. Its objective was to provide funding for initiatives to assist rural communities in India’s flood, drought, landslide, and other climate-related stresses.
Managed by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), the flagship scheme supported interventions in agriculture, water management, forestry, coastal protection, and climate-resilient infrastructure. More than 20 projects were funded by it between 2015 and 2021, bringing in thousands of frightened households.
India’s minister for environment, forest, and climate change, Bhupender Yadav, said the global meeting should be the “COP of adaptation,” as stated during a roundtable discussion in Brazil’s Belem city last month before the 30th UN climate change conference, or COP30, which was officially opened on Monday.
“The focus must be on transforming climate commitments into real-world actions that accelerate implementation and directly improve people’s lives”, he said, according to a statement released by the Indian government on October 13. According to the statement, he called for “a need to strengthen and increase the flow of public funds toward adaptation.”
India stated in another statement last Tuesday that “adaptation financing needs to exceed nearly 15 times current flows, and significant gaps remain in doubling international public finance for adaptation by 2025.”
“India emphasised that adaptation is an urgent priority for billions of vulnerable people in developing countries who have contributed the least to global warming but stand to suffer the most from its impacts”, said the statement.
However, the Indian government’s domestic policies do not match the words used at the climate summit.
NAFCC received an average of $3.3 million annually in its initial years of operation, according to government records. But the allocation steadily declined. The fund spent only $ 2.47 million during the fiscal year 2022-2023. No upfront commitment to funding was made, NAFCC was designated as a “scheme” by the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change in November 2022.
Since the financial year 2023-2024, zero money has been earmarked for the crucial climate adaptation fund.
As a result, several climate change initiatives in areas plagued by floods, cyclones, and landslides have been postponed despite the continued devastation caused by widespread climatic devastation. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman didn’t even use the terms “climate change” and “adaptation” in her hour-long speech when she presented the federal budget to parliament in February of this year.
“Announcing lofty adaptation goals abroad while starving the fund that safeguards our own citizens is misleading and a moral failure”, Raja Muzaffar Bhat, an environmental activist in Indian-administered Kashmir, told Al Jazeera, calling Yadav’s statements in Brazil “a gross distortion of reality and a dangerous distraction”.
Al Jazeera reached out to the ministries of finance and environment, forest, and climate change for their comments on reducing NAFCC funding, but they did not receive a response.
However, a representative from the Environment Ministry defended the government’s change in funding priorities, claiming that the government had not abandoned efforts to combat climate change.
“Funds are now being channelled through broader climate and sustainability initiatives rather than standalone schemes like the NAFCC”, the official told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
“Climate injustice at its most blatant”
Meanwhile, India’s climate crises continue to cause deaths and displacement.
In the Darbhanga district of Bihar, India’s poorest state, 38-year-old Sunita Devi has been displaced five times in seven years as floods in the nearby Kosi River repeatedly destroyed her mud house built on bamboo stilts.
Every monsoon, we live in fear. She remarked, “My children are no longer going to school because we shift between camps,” holding on to the family’s only lifeline, a government ration card, which grants them access to free or subventioned food grains.
This year saw one of the worst monsoons across India, as above-average rains killed hundreds and displaced millions. More than 1.7 million people were affected by floods in Bihar alone, killing dozens and submerging hundreds of villages.
Another impoverished eastern state, Ramesh Behera, a 45-year-old fisherman, watched his home’s Satabhaya village collapse into the Bay of Bengal in 2024 as rising seas continue to evict entire hamlets from the state. “The sea swallowed my home and my father’s fields. He declared to Al Jazeera, “Fishing is no longer enough to survive.”
Behera was forced to abandon his family’s traditional livelihoods, which included farming and fishing, and fled to distress migration to survive. He now works as a manual labourer in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Rising sea levels and coastal erosion have ravaged lands and homes in West Bengal state’s Sundarbans Islands, one of the largest mangrove forests in the world, forcing thousands of residents to relocate.
Revathi Selvam, 29, claims that the Bay of Bengal’s saltwater intrusion has poisoned her farmland and caused their paddy harvest to collapse in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district, which is located in the state of Nagapattinam.
“The soil is no longer fertile. Rice cultivation is no longer possible. Many residents of her village are considering moving to Chennai, the state capital, to work as construction workers, she said, adding that “we may have to leave farming altogether.”
In the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, 27-year-old hotel worker Arjun Thakur saw his livelihood vanish when a cloudburst in 2024 buried the small tourist lodge where he worked. The mountain “broke apart.” He recalled witnessing houses falling instantly.
Thakur now stays with his relatives in the state capital Shimla, unsure if he can ever return to his native place.
People like Devi, Behera, Selvam, and Thakur are denied access to a government program that helps them deal with their tragedies because NAFCC funding has been exhausted.
A government official, who previously worked with NAFCC, told Al Jazeera several schemes approved by the government under NAFCC were never implemented after funds began to dry up as early as 2021, exposing thousands of households to a recurring climate crisis.
Because he was not authorized to speak to the media, the official said, “The fund was created to help vulnerable communities adapt to the kind of repeated displacement we are currently witnessing.”
“States lost a crucial channel to protect people living on the frontlines of floods, landslides, and droughts once the allocations were ended. Now, these families are left to rebuild on their own, again and again”.
Bhat, an activist, claimed that India’s response to the NAFCC “demonstrates that adaptation is no longer a priority even as the country is experiencing record internal displacement from climate extremes.”
“The government has left its people’s homes, farms, and livelihoods to their own devices,” the statement read. If this continues, the next generation will inherit a country where climate refugees are a daily reality”, he said.
“This is climate injustice at its most blatant,” he says.
Migration is no longer merely a survival strategy.
Climate Action Network South Asia is a Dhaka-based coalition of about 250 civil society organisations, working in eight South Asian countries to promote government and individual action to limit human-induced climate change. According to its estimate, the climate crisis could force about 45 million people to relocate to India by 2050, which is threefold more than the current displacement figures.
We have long coastlines, hot and cold deserts, and Himalayan glaciers, according to the president. From tsunamis on our shores to flash floods, cloudbursts, and landslides in the mountains, we face the entire spectrum of climate extremes”, Bhat told Al Jazeera.
Bhat claimed that unchecked “development” of vulnerable areas is also a result of natural disasters.
“In the past, there were few frequent floods or cloudbursts and a low population density. Now, haphazard construction around mountain passes, waterways and streams, along with rampant deforestation, has amplified these disasters”, he said.
People who once fled New Delhi’s air pollution are now living in the Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand. Moving is no longer a choice, but rather a survival strategy.
Bhat warned that neglecting people affected by climate-related displacement could cause the world’s largest climate migration crisis.
“We no longer behave as our constitution promised, providing for welfare.” We pay taxes like developed nations, but receive services that cause climate crises, leaving many people to die. “We are completely unprepared for the mass migrations that will inevitably result from both our mountains and our plains,” he said.
Back at the temporary government shelter in Kashmir’s landslide-hit Sarh village, Ahmad fears an uncertain future for him and his family.
We will not just be homeless if we don’t have access to shelter and land, but we will also turn out to be refugees in our own land, cast aside, and without any other protection, he said.
Source: Aljazeera
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