Session Name: Women across Asia: Stories, Agencies, and Representations
Living at the Margins: Rising Precarity of the female prawn seedling catchers of Sunderbans
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: Tiger prawns, the “living dollars of the Sundarbans” are a delicacy that fetches very high prices, and India today, has become a leading exporter of tiger prawns in the world. However, the effects of this booming industry, rarely percolates down to the bottom of the supply chain- the rural female labour. This paper focuses on women prawn seedling catchers of the Sundarbans, where poverty drives more than 200,000 women every year to collect these seedlings under perilous, unsavory, and unrewarding conditions (Sarkar, 2017). The expansion of prawn cultivation through the Sundarbans has transformed the agricultural and biodiversity landscape of the region, with many vulnerable households, and women in particular, seeing this as the only option left to eke out a living. The Covid -19 pandemic further has added to the growing pressures on their already precarious livelihoods with rising indebtedness and competition from the male labour force. Drawing on our village study from the Sundarbans in West Bengal, the paper delves into the transforming gender relations of women prawn seedling catchers subsumed under debt who enter forced labour relations, while the industry is on a trajectory of growth. The invivibilization of female prawn catchers keeps them further away from accessing government supported social security programmes, further adding to their precarity. The vulnerability of the marginalized over the past couple of decades has exacerbated the struggle for survival and - the struggle to access food.