1. Introduction
The late 20th century witnessed two major global crises: environmental degradation and the continued systemic oppression of women. What was less apparent to mainstream legal thought was that these were not parallel problems demanding separate solutions but deeply intertwined pathologies rooted in the same cultural grammar — a grammar that authorised domination, extraction, and subordination, whether the subject was a forest, a river, or a woman.
The term “sustainable development” was first introduced by American environmentalist Lester R. Brown in his 1981 book Building a Sustainable Society. It received its universally accepted definition from the Brundtland Commission in its 1987 Report, Our Common Future: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Ecofeminism, as a theoretical framework, emerged precisely to name this convergence. Coined by French philosopher Françoise d’Eaubonne in 1974 and later developed by scholars such as Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, and Carolyn Merchant, ecofeminism contends that the exploitation of nature and the marginalisation of women are not coincidental but structurally connected.
Two recent events in West Bengal crystallise this failure in particularly stark terms. The brutal rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata in August 2024 and the sexual violence and land dispossession documented in Sandeshkhali in 2023–24 are not aberrations from an otherwise equitable system. They are, from an ecofeminist standpoint, its logical expressions — the endpoint of a hierarchy that treats women’s bodies, like the earth’s body, as resources available for appropriation.
II. Ecofeminism: Theoretical Foundations
The intellectual genealogy of ecofeminism is diverse, drawing on strands of feminist theory, deep ecology, postcolonial critique, and political economy. What unites these threads is the claim that the domination of women and the domination of nature are ideologically and structurally linked — and that any politics claiming to address environmental crisis that ignores gender is fundamentally incomplete.
A. The Conceptual Core
Carolyn Merchant’s landmark 1980 work,‘The Death of Nature,’ traced the shift in Western consciousness from a conception of Earth as a living, nurturing body deserving respect to a mechanistic resource available for exploitation. Vandana Shiva, writing from India, grounded this argument in the concrete realities of colonialism and development policy. In Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988), she argued that so-called ‘development’ exported by Western nations was, in fact, a form of mal-development — a process that systematically undervalued and destroyed the feminine principle (prakriti) embedded in Indian agriculture, forestry, and water management. Maria Mies extended this into a critique of global capitalism, arguing that women, nature, and colonised peoples constitute the hidden underside of capitalist accumulation — resources appropriated without compensation or consent.
B. Varieties of Ecofeminism
Radical or cultural ecofeminism holds that women possess a biologically grounded closeness to nature that men lack — a position that has attracted significant feminist critique for essentialising gender. Social ecofeminism, by contrast, locates the woman-nature connection in history: women have been assigned roles closer to nature and have therefore developed deeper environmental knowledge and stakes. The latter perspective is more analytically useful for legal scholarship, as it grounds women’s relationship to nature in material conditions that law can address.
C. Care Ethics and Law
Ecofeminism draws on care ethics — associated with Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings — which centres relationships, responsibilities, and interdependence over abstract rights and autonomy. Women’s environmental activism has consistently expressed a relational ethic: not ‘I own this forest’ but ‘we depend on this forest, and it depends on us.’
III. Women as Environmental Agents: The Indian Record
India’s modern environmental history cannot be written without women at its centre. From the hills of Uttarakhand to the coasts of Bengal, women have initiated, sustained, and frequently won environmental struggles that formal institutions had failed to address.
A. The Chipko Movement
In March 1974, women in Reni village in Chamoli district, led by Gaura Devi, physically embraced trees to prevent contractors from felling the forest on which their village depended. The Chipko Movement — from the Hindi word meaning ‘to cling’ — spread rapidly across the Uttar Pradesh hills, ultimately winning a moratorium of fifteen years on commercial tree-felling in Uttarakhand. As the menfolk migrated for work, women had come to depend on the forest for firewood, fodder, water, and agriculture — giving them uniquely powerful stakes in its survival.
B. The Narmada Bachao Andolan
The Sardar Sarovar Dam project on the Narmada River became the site of one of independent India’s most influential civil society struggles. Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), spearheaded by Medha Patkar, united Adivasis and farmers against the flooding of their lands without adequate rehabilitation. The NBA exposed the gendered dimensions of displacement: men could migrate for wage work; women, embedded in their communities and excluded from formal labour markets, experienced a qualitatively different and more total uprooting.
C. The Green Brigade of the Sundarbans
Following devastating cyclones Aila (2009), Amphan (2020), and Yaas (2021), more than eighteen thousand women in the Sundarbans delta united to plant and cultivate mangrove forests. The Green Brigade addresses two problems at once: the destruction of the ecosystem that protects the delta from cyclones and floods, and the social isolation of women in a society marked by high male out-migration and domestic violence. These women not only safeguard natural resources — they build networks of solidarity and leadership that make communities resilient from within.
IV. The Constitutional and Legislative Framework: An Ecofeminist Critique
A. Constitutional Provisions
India’s Constitution contains, in principle, the elements of an ecofeminist jurisprudence. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex. Article 21 has been expansively interpreted to include the right to a clean environment as well as to dignity and bodily integrity. Articles 48A and 51A(g) impose obligations on the state and citizens to protect and improve the environment. Yet the gap between these provisions and their gendered implementation is wide. Environmental law has remained formally gender-neutral — which, as feminist legal scholars argue, is itself a form of gender blindness.
B. The Forest Rights Act, 2006
The Act’s mandate that women be members of Forest Rights Committees was a significant statutory recognition of women’s stake in forest governance. In practice, however, social and political pressures routinely result in women’s formal presence without a substantive voice, or in their exclusion from the most consequential decisions regarding resource use and community forest management.
C. The Biological Diversity Act, 2002
The Act’s Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) provide, in theory, spaces for women’s participation in the governance of biological resources. In practice, the knowledge women possess of medicinal plants, seed varieties, and forest phenology is rarely recorded in the People’s Biodiversity Registers that BMCs are mandated to prepare. Women’s representation on BMCs remains consistently lower than the law’s intent would suggest.
D. Limitations of the Framework
The structural limitation of India’s environmental legal framework is that it was built without asking whose nature was being protected and for whose benefit. Environmental regulations have been drafted primarily from the perspective of state sovereignty and economic considerations, with no regard for women’s special reliance on and expertise regarding natural resources. The legal framework remains indifferent to the connection between gender discrimination and environmental destruction.
V. When the Body Becomes the Battlefield: RG Kar and Sandeshkhali
Ecofeminism has always argued that the female body and the body of nature are subjected to identical forms of domination and exploitation. The events of 2023–24 in West Bengal offered a stark, concrete embodiment of that argument.
A. The RG Kar Medical College Rape and Murder Case (2024)
The alleged sexual assault and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in August 2024 provoked nationwide outrage. The Supreme Court of India took suo moto cognizance, directing the CBI to take over the investigation and mandating a National Task Force on healthcare worker safety. These responses, while necessary, address the proximate cause without the structural one: the normalisation of male authority over institutional space — the same authority that has historically licensed the exploitation of natural commons.
B. The Sandeshkhali Incidents (2023–24)
In Sandeshkhali, women came forward with accusations of rape, land grabbing, and political intimidation against local strongman Shajahan Sheikh and his associates. Women protesters were threatened, assaulted, and socially ostracised, with allegations that police and local authorities backed the political network. Ecofeminism reveals that violence against women and land dispossession are interrelated mechanisms of subjugation: land control undermined women’s economic power while sexual abuse undermined their resistance. The Calcutta High Court directed a CBI inquiry, and Sheikh was arrested in February 2024.
C. The Common Thread
Both cases demonstrate the dynamic ecofeminism has long identified but that environmental law has failed to address when institutional accountability fails, the female body and the natural commons are the first sites of extraction. The same hierarchical system that believes itself invulnerable is the dynamic behind illegal mining, deforestation, and river pollution.
VI. Challenges to Gender-Inclusive Environmental Governance
A. Patriarchal Barriers in Decision-Making
Environmental management in India remains male-dominated, and women’s involvement is usually more symbolic than impactful. Environment policy implementation continues to be based on technocratic and growth-centered frameworks, entirely overlooking the environmental wisdom women have accumulated through lived experience.
B. The Double Burden of Climate Vulnerability
Climate change intensifies existing gender inequalities. As rainfall becomes erratic and groundwater depletes, the burden of water collection — almost universally a female responsibility in rural India — increases dramatically. The National Action Plan on Climate Change and its state equivalents do not systematically disaggregate climate impacts by gender or require gender-responsive design in mitigation and adaptation programmes.
C. The Undervaluation of Women’s Ecological Knowledge
Perhaps the most significant epistemic loss in India’s environmental governance is the systematic undervaluation of women’s ecological knowledge — of medicinal plants, water sources, soil quality, and seed varieties adapted to local conditions. Accumulated over generations, this knowledge is not captured in formal scientific databases, not consulted in environmental impact assessments, and not considered in forest management plans.
D. Violence as a Structural Barrier
The most fundamental barrier to women’s environmental agency is physical safety. Women who seek to protect forests from encroachment, report illegal sand mining, or resist land acquisition face threats and violence with little institutional protection. The same networks of political and criminal power that appropriate land also appropriate women’s bodies. No formal inclusion of women in forest committees or biodiversity boards can be meaningful if the women involved fear for their safety when they exercise their mandated authority.
VII. Recommendations
There is an urgent need for a national policy addressing both the unique vulnerabilities of women and their status as bearers of environmental knowledge. Environmental impact assessments and climate policies must incorporate gender-sensitive analysis grounded in the actual conditions faced by women.
Implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 must be improved by ensuring genuine participation of women in committees, with proper monitoring and accountability. The RG Kar case exposed the need for a central protection law for healthcare workers that addresses the hierarchy and gender-based violence endemic to institutions.
The Sandeshkhali case illustrated that sexual assault, and land dispossession must not be addressed in isolation. A new legislative framework addressing compound violations — of body and land together — is urgently needed. Ecofeminism must be incorporated into legal education, and women-led environmental campaigns such as the Chipko Movement and the Green Brigade must be legally recognised, protected, and institutionalised.
Grassroots initiatives point the way. In Piplantri, former Sarpanch Shyam Sundar Paliwal initiated the planting of 111 trees for every girl child born, simultaneously improving the environment, raising the female ratio, and practising sustainability — an ecofeminist approach applauded by the Supreme Court in T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India (2024).
***
Authors:
Author Bio
