“Do you know what hurts the most? Not the heat, not the hunger,” says Rumki from a forest village on the Jharkhand-Chhattisgarh border. “It is the silence that follows when I ask for help. The land dries, my husband leaves for the city, and I remain—with no rain, no shade, and no answers.”
In the tribal and agrarian heartlands of Central India, climate change is not a forecast—it is a lived reality. Monsoons arrive late or little. When they do, they flood rather than nurture. Heatwaves now stretch for months, scorching both crops and people. Agriculture has become a risky gamble, and when those bet fails, it isn’t only incomes that collapse but the delicate rhythm of rural life.
For those already living on the margins—smallholder farmers, landless workers, tribal families—the climate crisis deepens their vulnerability. But it is women who are bearing the brunt. Climate change is not gender-neutral. It follows the contours of inequality, and in doing so, it intensifies the invisible and unpaid labour that women have always shouldered.
Women in these communities are the custodians of care. They wake before sunrise to gather water, cook meals, work the land, and tend to children, the elderly, and the sick. With each passing year of erratic rainfall and depleted forests, this work grows heavier. As ponds vanish and wells run dry, fetching water becomes a long journey. Fuelwood collection now takes hours. Food insecurity forces them to sacrifice their own meals to feed others.
These burdens are only magnified by male migration. In many households, men leave in search of work—to factories, kilns, construction sites—returning only occasionally or not at all. What remains are families, with women left to manage fields, finances, and decisions, often without recognition or support. They become de facto heads of households, but without the institutional backup that such a role should entail.
Even health- her body becomes a climate battleground. In the blistering sun, women walk long distances to access medical care, often while pregnant or anaemic. Heat exhaustion, dehydration, and low birth weight are increasingly common. Health centres are either distant, under-equipped, or both. Many women, fearing the loss of a day’s labour, simply endure illness in silence.
For adolescent girls, the crisis unfolds in more insidious ways. With household workloads rising, they are often pulled out of school to help at home or in the fields. Early marriage and pregnancy become more common, their futures are narrowed before they can fully imagine them. Access to sexual and reproductive health services is constrained by geography, stigma, and chronic under-resourcing. ASHA workers—often the only point of contact—struggle to serve communities scattered across dense forests and difficult terrain.
What’s often missing from policy discourse is that this crisis is not just climatic—it is deeply gendered. It plays out in kitchens and courtyards, in seed banks and sick rooms. In recent months, women from districts of the tribal heartland have spoken of skipping meals, fainting during routine chores, or hiding symptoms to keep the household functioning. These aren’t isolated stories. They are indicators of a slow, silent erosion of wellbeing—physical, emotional, and economic.
And yet, amid this exhaustion, there is quiet leadership. Across many forest and farming communities, women’s collectives are emerging as frontlines of resilience. They are reviving traditional grains, growing backyard gardens, conserving seeds, and forming savings groups to weather lean seasons. In some places, women are engaging with local panchayats on forest rights, water access, and anganwadi services. These aren’t mere coping strategies—they are acts of everyday defiance and vision.
But resilience must not be mistaken for endless capacity. The truth is that we, as a society, have built our climate response plans forgetting the unpaid, unrecognised labour of rural women. That must change. A feminist lens on climate resilience is no longer optional—it is urgent. Investments in gender-sensitive adaptation must move beyond tokenism. We need decentralised, women-led local eco-systems. We need water security plans that account for women’s daily journeys. We need nutrition and SRHR services that reach forest hamlets and tribal blocks. We need to invest in the informal infrastructures of care that women have sustained for generations.
One such framework quietly gaining ground is that of Neighbourhoods of Care—spaces, both physical and social, where women support each other, share dreams, pass down knowledge, and rebuild collective strength. These neighbourhoods are not a luxury; they are a necessity. They offer a way to reimagine wellbeing as shared thriving. These ideas align closely with the spirit of locality, compact —anchored in lived realities, driven by women’s leadership, and centred on dignity.
Rumki’s voice, though soft, carries across the ravines and red soils of Central India. It asks us not just to witness suffering, but to redesign the systems. We can no longer afford a silence that follows women’s cries for help. What they need is not sympathy—but solidarity, infrastructure, and justice.
