ABSTRACT
Increasing impacts of climate change in recent years have led to heightened focus on climate-induced migration from different disaster-prone areas of India. Although migration for livelihood diversification has existed as an adaptation strategy for farmers, increasing frequency of climate extremes is changing the contribution of climate as a sole variable for inducing migration. This study based on household surveys and group discussions tries to examine the monocausality between climate variability and migration from historical narrative perspective to tease out the role of climate in the overall setting of socio-economic factors in a drought-prone region in Eastern India. Historical narratives show how eventual eroding of financial and physical assets due to regular droughts played an important role in inducing migration on a regular basis. Further the paper examines the vulnerability of households and their links to migration and climate. The chapter argues that building assets of poor people who are at the threshold of slipping into chronic poverty is important in engaging households in remunerative migration as an adaptation to climate change rather than distressed migration.
