Women queue to fill their buckets, Bolangir, Odisha, India 18.1.2022. ©Nairita Roy Chaudhuri
Most small farmers in rural India directly depend on rainwater for agricultural production and subsistence livelihoods. However, climate change is intensifying droughts, threatening crop productivity, the food and livelihood security of agrarian farmers, and increasing their risks of hunger and malnutrition. Recognizing climate change as a health and existential crisis, adapting to water scarcity and droughts is essential for the sustainable well-being of rural communities, alongside mitigation efforts. The health consequences of climate change intersect with gender, as rural women bear the primary responsibility for ensuring water security for domestic consumption and performing care or reproductive work.
In my doctoral research, I employed ethnographic methods to explore how law can enable rural communities living in postcolonial societies, examined in particular within the framework of gender and colonial power relations, to sustainably adapt to droughts and water scarcity. Conducting fieldwork in the semi-arid belts of rural parts of West Bengal (Puruliya district) and Odisha (Bolangir, Bargarh, and Rayagada districts) between December 2021 and May 2022, I explored the intersections of water (in)security and gendered labor. With over three hundred participants, I qualitatively analyzed climate-affected small farmers’ accounts of water sourcing, their reflections on water’s domestic and agricultural uses, and the gendered division of water-related labor and time.
I found that domestic water access — through handpumps, ponds, and community dugwells — is shaped by gender roles and is considered “women’s work.” I refer to the total time invested by women to ensure water security for households as reproductive burden-time on water. In western Odisha, under normal conditions, women invest about three to five hours daily fetching, searching for, and waiting for water. During summer, this increases to seven to ten hours daily. These struggles are intersectional; for instance, Dalit women face caste-based discrimination that extends their waiting time due to Brahmanical untouchability practices at village levels.
Most women participants did not single out water scarcity as a standalone problem. Rather, they expressed feeling “busy,” lacking “time,” “peace,” and “rest” due to simultaneous shortages of water, fuelwood (used for cooking), forest resources, and income. Inquiring about water scarcity led me to conclude that rural communities, especially women, face overlapping crises — of water, food, fuelwood, ecological resources, health, time, and income — culminating in what I refer to as a broader crisis of reproduction. The overlapping socio-ecological crises are inherently gendered as women farmers carry the double responsibility of household carework, including water provisioning, alongside agricultural and farm-related tasks.
Women participants in western Odisha, for example, reported that they perform 70-80% of productive agricultural tasks, including sowing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, processing crops, and storing seeds for the next agricultural cycle. This is in addition to fulfilling reproductive household work, such as collecting fuelwood, making biofuels, fetching water, cleaning, and feeding family members. In both Odisha and West Bengal, the cumulative crisis and the double burden of productive and reproductive labor increase the reproductive burden-time on water, leaving rural women busy, exhausted, time-poor, and longing for peace and rest.
Feminist political ecologist Farhana Sultana argues that addressing the negative impacts of climate change on human and planetary health requires confronting its colonial roots and the enduring structures of coloniality that persist despite formal decolonisation. Sultana’s concept of climate coloniality, structured through “neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education” highlights historical continuities of extraction and dispossession since European colonization. In this view, the climate crisis in rural societies is not just a fossil fuel problem but stems from deeper, historical drivers institutionalizing European extractive modes of living, violently dispossessing labor from land and from community relations. Climatic droughts and scarcity of water, food, and healthy lives are deeply rooted in a colonial legacy.
Furthermore, the social reproduction theory focuses on the unpaid care work performed by women in maintaining and sustaining economic and agricultural production. It questions how the state and the economy prioritize and conceptualize “work” in ways that devalue care activities. Ecofeminism builds on social reproduction theory, arguing that women’s labor and natural resources are simultaneously exploited to drive economic growth and capital accumulation. When read with social reproduction theory, climate coloniality reveals the patriarchal drivers of the climate crisis that intersect with European and extractivist modes of living, ultimately prioritizing economic and income production over women’s carework and the reproduction of life.
The Paris Agreement urges member states to undertake climate actions that respect human rights, health, indigenous rights, the right to development, gender equality, and intergenerational equity. However, international climate adaptation and human rights law remain tied to the notion of sustainable development. Article 7(2) of the Paris Agreement calls for adaptation measures that address the needs of vulnerable populations in developing countries, linking them with sustainable development and poverty eradication.
For rural women, both domestic and extra-household labor constitute work. In contrast, sustainable development’s focus on economic growth and metrics like Gross Domestic Product allows for prioritization of agricultural production at the cost of undervaluation of reproductive and unpaid care work essential for sustaining a healthy life. Concepts like sustainable development and the right to development, embedded in international law, continue to equate well-being with economic growth, which falsely assumes that economic growth and development help to achieve ecological and social sustainability. Climate coloniality reminds us of the root causes of climate and health crises, including the hegemonic concept of sustainable development, perpetuating a crisis of reproduction of life and labor.
Subsistence-based rural communities in developing countries like India are reaching their health limits to adapt to climate crisis. They are already suffering from a food crisis, shortage of fuelwood, unbearable hunger, and thirst for water. Climate coloniality worsens health conditions, making climate change a profound health crisis. To support the well-being of subaltern communities in the postcolony, international climate change adaptation rights, such as the right to health and other life rights, must be embedded in a counter-hegemonic notion of a good life that breaks away from a model that rewards accumulative and extractive tendencies of growth/profit over life.
Nairita Roy Chaudhuri is an external doctoral researcher within the European Joint Doctorate in Law and Development program, at Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, and Oslo University. In her transdisciplinary research titled, “Enabling Limits: A Subaltern Theory of Transforming Boundary Struggles for Sustainable Climate Change Adaptation,” she explores the role of law in enabling subaltern communities to sustainably adapt to water scarcity and droughts under climate change, by focusing on gender relations. She is also working as a research fellow in Imperialism, Business & Human Rights at Tilburg Law School.
