Modern-Day Mobilization: Women’s Movements in India Post-Globalization

The 1991 liberalization reforms opened India’s economy to global capital, multinational corporations, and large-scale extractive projects. For women, particularly those in rural, tribal, and forest-dependent communities, this shift was not abstract economic theory. It arrived as bulldozers at the edges of their fields, as Memorandums of Understanding signed in faraway capitals, and as police platoons sent to clear land their families had cultivated for generations. In response, a new chapter of women’s mobilization has unfolded across India, one that links land, forest, body, and livelihood into a single political claim. These contemporary movements look very different from the urban feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 80s, and yet they carry forward the same insistence: that women’s lives cannot be separated from the economic structures that govern them.

Globalization and a new terrain of struggle 🔗

After the introduction of liberalization, privatization, and globalization (LPG) reforms, the Indian state increasingly positioned itself as a facilitator of corporate investment. Land, forests, minerals, and rivers, all of which had supported community livelihoods, became sites of large-scale acquisition for steel plants, bauxite mines, coal blocks, and Special Economic Zones. The women’s movement in the post-1990 period began responding to these shifts with new organizational forms, including unions of informal sector workers, ecological movements, and grassroots resistance against displacement.

What changed was not just the scale of dispossession but its character. Where earlier struggles often targeted patriarchy within the household or discriminatory laws within the state, the new struggles confront a triangle of forces: the state, the private corporation, and the global financial flows behind them. Women in these movements are not asking for inclusion in development. They are questioning the very definition of development being imposed on them.

Why women are at the front 🔗

Women in agrarian and tribal economies often have the most direct stake in land and forests. They collect firewood, fetch water, gather minor forest produce, tend kitchen gardens, and manage paddy and betel cultivation. When a project threatens to convert forest into mine or farmland into factory, women lose the resource base that supports household food and income. They also tend to be the last to find alternative wage work after displacement. This material reality, more than any ideology, has placed women at the front of resistance.

Anti-POSCO resistance in Odisha 🔗

In 2005, the Odisha government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the South Korean steel giant POSCO for what was then the largest proposed foreign direct investment in India, a USD 12 billion integrated steel plant in Jagatsinghpur district. The project required acquiring land from villages such as Dhinkia, Govindpur, and Patana, where families depended on betel vine cultivation, paddy, cashew, and fishing. The communities formed the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti, and women emerged as the visible spine of the resistance.

Bodies as barricades 🔗

For more than a decade, women, children, and elders formed human barricades to block officials and police from entering the project area. Women remained at the forefront of the resistance, and many of them, including children and elderly people, were injured while protecting their villages and lands. When police platoons attempted to enter Govindpur in 2011 to destroy betel vines, frail women, young and old, stood against lathi charges, with some stripping partially in protest after sustained assaults. The act was a deliberate, painful invocation of an older tradition of women using their bodies to shame state power.

What is striking about the Anti-POSCO struggle is that it combined direct action with legal mobilization. Villagers filed cases under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, arguing that diversion of forest land required gram sabha consent. After more than a decade of resistance, legal hurdles, and shifting market conditions, POSCO formally withdrew from the project in March 2017. The state, however, transferred much of the same land to JSW Utkal Steel, and the resistance continues, with women again leading the charge against renewed displacement.

Vedanta and the Niyamgiri struggle 🔗

The struggle against Vedanta Resources, the British mining major, unfolded in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha, on the border of Rayagada and Kalahandi districts. The hills are home to the Dongria Kondh, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, who consider the highest peak, Niyam Dongar, the sacred seat of their deity Niyam Raja. In 2003, Vedanta signed an agreement with the Odisha Mining Corporation to extract bauxite from the hilltop to feed its alumina refinery at Lanjigarh.

The Dongria Kondh women’s stand 🔗

For more than a decade, Dongria Kondh women stood at the front of the resistance. They call themselves Jharnia, or protectors of streams, a name that reflects their relationship with the perennial waters of Niyamgiri. They formed human chains around the base of the mountain, travelled over 1,600 kilometres to Delhi to demand the release of arrested leaders, and refused to be moved by repeated state pressure. “I will not leave my Niyam Raja until I die,” declared one Dongria woman, capturing the spirit of a resistance that fused ecology, faith, and survival.

The Niyamgiri struggle is significant because it produced one of the few clear legal victories for tribal communities in post-liberalization India. In 2013, the Supreme Court directed that 12 gram sabhas decide on the fate of the mining project, and all of them unanimously rejected Vedanta’s proposal. The verdict marked a constitutional recognition that local communities, with women’s active participation in the gram sabhas, had the right to refuse mining on their sacred and customary lands.

Tribal women in Chhattisgarh against coal mining 🔗

While Vedanta’s most visible struggle was in Odisha, the broader logic of mineral extraction has played out with similar intensity in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Aranya forests. Spread over 170,000 hectares across Korba, Surguja, and Surajpur districts, Hasdeo is one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest in central India, a migratory corridor for elephants and the catchment of the Hasdeo river.

The new Chipko 🔗

On 26 April 2022, when state authorities and contractors of the Adani Group arrived to fell trees for the Parsa East Kete Basen coal block, women in Janardanpur village of Surajpur district reached the site and hugged the trees in a deliberate recreation of the 1970s Chipko movement. By the time they intervened, around 300 trees had already been cut. The women, along with other Adivasi villagers, formed the backbone of the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, which has organized long-distance padyatras to Raipur and Delhi to demand the cancellation of coal blocks.

The Jango Raitad Mahila Sangathan, a collective of Adivasi women in the region, has been a key voice in protests. As one Adivasi woman from Ghatbarra village put it during a march to the state capital, the forest is the source of their identity, and giving up their land would mean giving up who they are. The Hasdeo struggle has continued despite the Forest Advisory Committee’s earlier recommendations against mining, gram sabha resolutions under the Forest Rights Act, and a no-go classification by the Ministry of Environment in 2010.

The evolving nature of women’s resistance 🔗

Three features distinguish these contemporary women’s movements from earlier phases of mobilization.

Direct confrontation with the state 🔗

In the post-globalization period, the state is not simply an arbiter that can be petitioned. It is often the partner of the corporation, signing MoUs, deploying police, and clearing forests. Women in POSCO villages, Niyamgiri, and Hasdeo are therefore confronting state machinery directly, through gram sabhas, courts, and protest. The Anti-POSCO movement faced severe repression and criminalization, with women among those most often beaten and detained.

Centring sustainable livelihoods 🔗

These movements do not reject development outright. They reject a model of development that converts living ecosystems into balance sheet assets. The women of Niyamgiri, Hasdeo, and Jagatsinghpur insist that betel vines, paddy fields, perennial streams, and forest produce are not “backward” livelihoods waiting to be replaced by mining wages. They are sustainable, productive systems that already feed families and generate culture. Reclaiming the commons has become a central axis of feminist economic justice in India.

Linking environment, gender, and law 🔗

The contemporary movements have learned to combine the moral authority of women’s frontline presence with the legal authority of instruments like the Forest Rights Act, 2006, the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, and constitutional protections for Adivasis. The Niyamgiri verdict and the gram sabha resolutions in Hasdeo show how legal tools, when backed by sustained women-led mobilization, can stall and even reverse projects that appeared inevitable.

Continuities and challenges 🔗

These struggles have not always ended in victory. Land in the former POSCO area has been transferred to JSW, the Hasdeo coal mines continue to expand, and Vedanta has repeatedly attempted to revive proposals for the Lanjigarh refinery. Women defenders face criminalization, surveillance, and personal cost, including denial of healthcare and neglected gynaecological conditions due to police restrictions on movement in protest villages. The participation of rural women in mass movements, including the more recent farmers’ protests, suggests, however, that the resistance is widening rather than fading.

What these movements collectively show is that women in post-liberalization India are not waiting to be empowered by external development programmes. They are already exercising political agency, often at considerable risk, to defend the ecological and economic foundations of their communities. Their mobilization redraws the map of the women’s movement itself, moving its centre from metropolitan campaigns to forests, hills, and coastal villages where the costs of globalization are most directly borne.

What do you think? Should the gram sabha consent process used in Niyamgiri become the standard for every large extractive project across India? And when women repeatedly put their bodies on the line to defend land and forest, what does that tell us about who is actually doing the work of conserving the country’s ecological commons?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp10/chapter/challenges-to-the-womens-movement-globalization-and-communalism/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-POSCO_movement
3. https://www.fidh.org/en/region/asia/india/india-land-rights-defenders-under-attack-in-odisha-state
4. https://theworld.org/stories/2016/07/31/indian-women-strip-protest-against-land-acquisition
5. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/posco-villages–resist-land-acquisition-by-odisha-government-33590
6. https://www.survivalinternational.org/galleries/women
7. https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/tribals-in-niyamgiri-protest-against-bauxite-mining-by-vedanta-limited
8. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/forests/women-in-chhattisgarh-recreate-chipko-movement-to-save-hasdeo-aranya-82597
9. https://behanbox.com/2024/01/09/why-adivasis-of-hasdeo-aranya-are-back-on-the-streets-again/
10. https://www.omct.org/en/resources/statements/india-land-rights-defenders-under-attack-in-odisha-state
11. https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/reclaiming-commons-gender-and-economic-justice-struggles-and-movements-india
12. https://sanhati.com/excerpted/6693/
13. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-45-womens-movement-india/