Inside Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Shamu Barap, a Warli woman in her 50s has had to assert herself as a legitimate resident. “This land is my right and I have to fight for it. I will die fighting. I also taught my children the same,” she says. Her belief that an Adivasi cannot live without the forest and a forest cannot grow without an Adivasi stands firm in the face of official policies and judicial orders to protect the green area at the cost of people. Life and home for the Warlis, unlike in the congested chaotic city outside, are tied to the environment they inhabit.
In Pune, livelihood issues intersect with identity, solid waste management, and climate change for women waste pickers like Vidya Naik Navre, 36. She and hundreds of her coworkers, supported by Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, have been fighting for recognition as legitimate workers contributing to the reduction of pollution while earning their livelihood.[1]
Neither Barap nor Navre fit the bill of a feminist or participant in women’s movements, neither is seen as environmentalist. Like them, thousands of women fisherfolk, protesters against polluting projects, women frontrunners working for the Bhopal Gas tragedy victims, anti-big dam activists, heat and flood researchers who study the intersection of gender with these climatic events, among others, do not neatly fall into either feminist or environmentalist category – they are both, sometimes all at once.
To inquire whether and how women’s issues and women’s movements have influenced environmentalism – and the other way around – is to walk on a path where the two lanes cannot be easily separated. To look for an intersection of feminism and environmentalism is messy because these strands of life meet all the time. Semantics takes us into the territory of eco-feminism, a term that makes many uncomfortable and suspicious, especially the power structures that depend on status quo patriarchal view of the world.
Leave aside the semantics, look at the range of women, known and otherwise, whose work straddles it all. Women environmentalists like Jane Goodall; women in other domains with work in the environment sector like scientists Rachel Carson and Vandana Shiva, social scientist Medha Patkar, fierce villager Gaura Devi and her band of ten women in the Chipko movement. Women politicians like the late Indira Gandhi who ensured that India had laws on environment and took them seriously, and Mary Robinson, first woman President of Ireland whose statement “climate change is a man-made problem with a feminist solution” stirred more than a hornet’s nest.
There were women economists who thought equally about the environment like Marilyn Waring whose book If Women Counted showed how the world’s accounting system valued militarism, environmental destruction, and tools of colonisation while it made peace, environmental resources, and social organisation look worthless. Women activists and NGO leaders like the late Kenyan Wangari Maathai whose Green Belt Movement taught women to plant trees in deforested areas of the country and use their knowledge to earn; she was the first African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. And, of course, scores of everyday women like Barap and Navre who live asserting their womanhood and connection with the environment without articulating it.
Photo: QoC File
Many issues but women always there
“The women’s movement as a whole has always taken a stand that all issues are women’s issues. All issues are feminist issues,” says Dr Nandita Gandhi, researcher, writer, and co-director of Mumbai-based Akshara Centre, who has been involved in the women’s movement since the 1980s. She cites the example of women from Mumbai’s fishing communities who had to adjust to reduced fish sales because fish catch was lower than it used to be due to environmental factors. This worsened with the construction of the Coastal Road.[2] Here too, Koli women protested and demanded that the government increase the span between two pillars of the road, from 60 to 120 metres, to allow fishing boats to pass.[3]
“The first environmental struggles in India took place for land reforms and were led by Adivasi women. There was no urban leadership,” notes Lata PM, Bahujan feminist critic, environmentalist, and educator. A pillar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan led by the late Baba Amte and Medha Patkar, Lata notes that before it, “movements were tied to culture, environment, and land ownership.” The Andolan saw several women emerge as leaders to stop the dam from submerging their villages.[4] As towns rapidly urbanised, Lata says, it was the working-class women who turned crusaders.
In Bhopal, after the gas leak in December 1984, women survivors-turned-activists like Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla led the women’s march from Bhopal to Delhi five years later to demand fair compensation. “It marked a turning point wherein poor, marginalised, and voiceless women discovered the power of their collective strength…Together, we became a formidable force, unafraid to challenge the might of Union Carbide and confront unresponsive, insensitive, and often hostile governments,” they said in this interview.[5]
The fight for social justice in Bhopal case could well be called women’s movement. This year, when the toxic waste was finally moved to Pithampur town, Madhya Pradesh, it was the women there who opposed the incineration plan because of its possible impact on the environment and health of residents.[6] Life and environmental issues intertwined deeply.
Sustainability and social justice are interlinked too. For example, in Mumbai, when residents of informal settlements along the Tansa pipeline were resettled in Mahul, a refinery area with high pollution levels, by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority in 2017, many women protested by making the footpaths of Vidyavihar their ‘home’ while others like Anita Dattatreya Dhole battled it out in the Bombay High Court too[7] which deemed Mahul “unfit” to live in.
Far away in Koodankulam too, it was the women who juggled between running their homes and being at the protest site against the nuclear power plant. In northern Chennai’s Ennore, women were at the forefront of the protests against the Coromandel Fertiliser Unit in 2024 when there was an ammonia leak.[8] Clearly, from forests and rivers to pollution and housing, women have merged their issues and environmentalism.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Footprints of women’s movements
While instances are of many women doing environmental work, the jury is out on whether feminist struggles and women’s movements have had an impact on environmentalism. The strands, while not easy to separate, would best lend themselves to an osmosis impact – not direct and visible, but indirect and gradual, more organic than intentional.
Waste pickers, while not your traditional environmentalists, should be seen as climate warriors in cities because without their work of segregating waste, the climate impact in cities would be worse. Their struggles, under various groups and the Indian Alliance of Waste Pickers, are for better facilities as well as space to store the recyclables which would have otherwise clogged up landfills. “We can’t talk about the environment in cities till we start segregating waste. Done at source, it’s a means to just transition too,” says Jyoti Mhapsekar, founder and president of Stree Mukti Sanghatana which organised Mumbai’s waste picker women decades ago. In Bengaluru, Hasiru Dala revolutionised the way in which waste is managed with the 2Bin1Bag idea.[9]
The intersection is difficult to unravel even in transport. Women allowed free rides in public buses,[10] like in Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, can help enlarge the ridership in public transport which, in turn, means reduced emissions. If these buses are run on green energy, it would address two issues at once – women’s mobility and clean air. And, of course, in Ahmedabad, women were empowered by the Mahila Housing Trust to install ‘cool roofs’ to save their families from oppressive heat waves.[11]
A place at the decision-making table
“The denunciation of their vulnerability and the implementation of development campaigns are the two main types of work run by women’s and feminist organisations,” stated this paper[12] Living in informal settlements, slums or pavements, means women have to struggle harder to cook, store water and fuel, take care of the household, often in the face of intense heat, floods and air pollution which are climate-related. When climate impact forces rural folk to migrate, women as climate migrants to cities face a harder life than most.
Should they speak as environmentalists or women? Ideally, both.
Neha Saigal, Director (Gender and Climate Change), Asar Social Impact Advisors, believes that women’s groups and women’s issues have not influenced environmentalism. “Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough of an intersection between women’s movements and the environmental space in India. It’s surprising because you see a lot of women at the forefront of environmental movements but women’s issues are neglected…feminist movements on issues of unpaid care work, health, safety, mobility, reproductive rights, health are all integral to environmental movements. There’s alignment of gender and climate but it does not always come up in environmental movements.”
It has to do with the place at the decision-making table. “Women’s participation in development decisions is marginal,” says Jayapadma, Lead (Programmes and Partnerships) at South Asia Women Foundation India, “Whether village-level planning or otherwise, women have not claimed their space and decided on planning. Environmentalism is a lot about deciding how the resources should be distributed, used, and who gets access to them and so on.” Women are only now beginning to claim their space in environmental decision-making though in limited ways, she adds.
The Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet, one of the first women-led international environmental conferences, was held way back in 1991. On its agenda was to make others aware that environmental degradation is the result of a capitalist, industrial economy.[13] Despite this and Greenpeace’s assertion that feminism and environmentalism go hand in hand to provide a way out of the current global crisis,[14] in power structures dominated by the patriarchal, tech-led, capitalist approach, where the environment and its resources are meant to be exploited for profits, women have yet to make a paradigm-changing breakthrough.
Photo: QoC File
Steps forward
How can women’s voices be amplified and how should women break into these power structures? Kanchi Kohli, researcher, educator and communicator of environmental law and policy, believes that the first step is to acknowledge that there is a difference in the vulnerabilities, impacts, and decision-making spaces that exist. “If you start with that premise, you automatically will have to address it. The policy needs to be open, where policy makers do not assume they know everything.” Nandita Gandhi also says that policy makers must invite the affected women every time they try to find solutions.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 mandates ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ while the Gender Snapshot Report 2024 recommends ‘investing in social protection systems and the care economy to reduce poverty and create green jobs’. Although women and girls represent half of the world’s population, gender gaps are evident in nearly every social, economic, and political index. At current rate, the UN itself says that it will take 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.[15]
Given this, change has to be at micro levels. One of the interventions Asar started in Delhi was to get men involved in care work because the care burden increases with the climate crisis. It has also been training women journalists at the grassroots in Maharashtra to tell stories of climate change and its impact because “the climate narrative is so masculine. We want to bring out more of their narratives and stories to influence the mainstream climate discourse,” says Saigal.
The positioning of women-as-victims also needs to change, says Kohli, “Most are recipients of policy decisions or solutions, not a party to it. Women are often seen as messengers or tactics of a particular strategy but not as equal leaders.” In cities, it’s much worse, adds Saigal, though women from lower classes and castes are more vulnerable to environmental hazards, there is no acknowledgement, understanding, let alone planning about how they can be part of policy discourses and participation. “So, it needs to start from sensitisation.”
This is in line with the Gender Snapshot Report which calls for ‘climate policymaking led by women, redistributing resources to build their resilience to climate change and loss of biodiversity, and providing reparations for harms caused by carbon emissions’. It starts from every home and community; women having a greater say in decisions can translate into them taking environmental action and decisions too. Feminism and environmentalism need not be in silos because in the lives of many women, they are not.
Jashvitha Dhagey is a multimedia journalist and researcher. A recipient of the Laadli Media Award consecutively in 2023 and 2024, she observes and chronicles the multiple interactions between people, between people and power, and society and media. She developed a deep interest in the way cities function, watching Mumbai at work. She holds a post-graduate diploma in Social Communications Media from Sophia Polytechnic.
Cover photo: Women at the forefront of the protests against the Coromandel Fertiliser Unit in Chennai’s Ennore. Credit: Poovulagin Nanbargal
