The Right to Relocate: Establishing an Enforceable Legal Framework for Planned Climate Relocation in India

Abstract

Indian law responds to climate-related hazards chiefly through the vocabulary of disaster relief: evacuation, shelter, and ex gratia payment. It has no comparable vocabulary for the slower, more final problem of places that are becoming unfit to live in. This article examines that gap through the lens of planned relocation the managed, state-facilitated, permanent movement of people away from land that scientific evidence shows can no longer sustainably support them. Drawing on the Disaster Management Act, 2005 and its 2025 amendment, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, and the Supreme Court's recognition of a constitutional right against the adverse effects of climate change in M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2024), the article shows that existing law can respond to a flood or a cyclone but has no procedure for deciding, in advance and on evidence, that a place should be left. Using case studies from the Sundarbans, Assam, and Odisha, it demonstrates the practical cost of this absence: relocation happens, but on an ad hoc, discretionary, and frequently impoverishing basis. Building on recent scholarship that has called for a general climate-displacement statute, the article's principal contribution is a more granular operational architecture the Climate Relocation Rights Framework (CRRF) that specifies who assesses habitability, who qualifies for recognition, what a relocated household is entitled to, who selects and pays for a relocation site, and how relocation is reviewed and monitored after the fact. The framework is anchored in a proposed non-impoverishment principle, under which a household may not be left materially worse off by a relocation undertaken for its own safety, and in a cumulative necessity test that distinguishes relocation that is scientifically warranted from relocation that merely offers administrative convenience. The article argues that India does not need a wholly new constitutional theory to support this framework; it needs a statutory and institutional mechanism to operationalise rights the courts have already recognised.