research overview
- Title: Living at the Margins: the Rising Precarity of Female Prawn Seedling Catchers in the Sunderbans, India Overveiw: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. The shrimp industry in the country contributes to 13 per cent of global shrimp production (second after China) and is the top exporter to the US at 41 per cent (Sea Food Watch, 2019). 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 tiger prawn seedlings under perilous, unsavory, and unrewarding conditions. 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 alongside competition from the male labour force. This research on the Sundarbans in West Bengal, delves into the myriad ways the female prawn seedling catchers engage in various survival strategies of securing their livelihood, where alongside the rising precarity, they are drawn into debt induced force labour; while the industry is on a trajectory of growth.
