Gendered Justice In Disaster Relief: Legal Gaps In Protecting Women Farmers From Climate-Induced Displacement

Abstract

This paper examines how climate disasters disproportionately affect rural women in India, who face legal invisibility and systemic exclusion from land rights, disaster relief, and climate governance. Despite comprising over 70% of agricultural labour, women remain unrecognized as farmers, especially in patriarchal and caste-based structures. Drawing on case studies from Bihar, Assam, and Maharashtra, it highlights how gender-blind disaster laws and missing documentation marginalize women, especially Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim farmers. The paper calls for urgent legal reforms, intersectional data, inclusive governance, and community-based resilience to ensure climate justice for India’s most vulnerable agricultural actors.

Introduction

To what extent do India’s disaster relief and environmental legal frameworks account for the specific vulnerabilities of women farmers displaced by climate-induced disasters, and how might these frameworks be strengthened to support gender-just recovery and resilience?

More than just scorching crops or drowning fields, climate disasters in rural India destroy the invisible safety nets of millions of women who toil the land without legal protection, ownership, or acknowledgement.

Indian women continue to be largely excluded from land ownership, legal farmer status, and disaster relief decision-making processes, even though they make up more than 70% of the agricultural labor (FAO, 2023). India's legal frameworks for environmental protection and disaster response are remarkably gender-blind, despite the increasing frequency and severity of climate-induced catastrophes like floods, droughts, and cyclones. The nation is at a turning point: will its laws change to take into account the reality faced by its most disadvantaged farmers, or will they remain neutral and ignore them?

The Feminization of Climate Risk: When Women Shoulder a Broken System

Male out migration has drastically changed rural agricultural landscapes throughout India, forcing women to handle all aspects of farm management. Women are becoming the primary caregivers for agricultural production, managing crop cycles, caring for livestock, and supervising irrigation systems. This change is particularly noticeable in drought-stricken areas like Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, where conventional farming methods have been destroyed by years of water scarcity, falling groundwater levels, and unpredictable monsoon patterns (Oxfam India, 2015). In these regions, women are frequently left to support their family on a meager income, dealing with structural injustices such lack of access to loans, seeds, and agricultural extension services in addition to climatic hardship.

In the same vein, seasonal floods frequently uproot villages and force people to relocate in flood-prone areas like Assam and Bihar. But in these situations, women's vulnerabilities are exacerbated. Land ownership frequently stays in male names due to patriarchal norms and legal frameworks, depriving women of official recognition and preventing them from accessing rehabilitation programs and disaster relief compensation (ActionAid India, 2023). Because of this exclusion, women are marginalized in recovery decision-making and reconstruction activities, and they are not included in official statistics or policy responses.

Crucially, rather than being the result of isolated incidents, this condition represents a systematic shift in agrarian labor. Women continue to be imprisoned in "time poverty," a situation where their ability to adjust to climate challenges is significantly hampered by unpaid caregiving and household chores, notwithstanding their growing responsibilities (UN Women, 2021). The majority of caregiving responsibilities in displacement camps and resettlement sites fall on women, who frequently do so in unsanitary conditions, with few legal protections, and without meaningful involvement in disaster or resettlement planning (CSE India, 2022). They are more at danger during climate crises because of the cycle of vulnerability created by the junction of work obligations and legal invisibility.

Legal Invisibility: How India’s Disaster Laws Erase Women Farmers

There is a clear blind spot in India's disaster management system when it comes to identifying and resolving the unique risks faced by female farmers. Women farmers face particular obstacles that are not addressed in policy and practice since the Disaster Management Act of 2005, the foundational legislation, does not specifically recognize them as a special and vulnerable category. Although the National Policy on Disaster Management (NPDM, 2009) acknowledges the significance of "gender sensitivity," this is merely lip service and lacks practical tools like gender-responsive relief distribution, rehabilitation grants, or customized support programs that could significantly assist women in the wake of climate-related disasters (Government of India, 2005; NPDM, 2009).

These legal omissions have severe practical repercussions. Less than 10% of the women impacted by the terrible Kosi floods in Bihar in 2008, for instance, received any kind of disaster compensation, according to a startling statistic (Choudhary, 2020). The underlying explanation was straightforward but systemic: because of deeply ingrained patriarchal conventions surrounding property and identity, compensation and relief programs are typically associated with official household headship papers, bank accounts, or land ownership records, all of which disproportionately exclude women. When legal entitlement is tied to documents that women hardly ever possess, their significant contributions to caregiving and agricultural labor go unnoticed.

There are serious practical consequences to these legal omissions. For example, it is shocking to see that less than 10% of the women affected by the devastating Kosi floods in Bihar in 2008 received any form of disaster compensation (Choudhary, 2020). The underlying explanation was simple but systemic: compensation and relief programs are usually linked to official household headship papers, bank accounts, or land ownership records, all of which disproportionately exclude women, due to deeply embedded patriarchal conventions surrounding property and identity. Women's important contributions to caregiving and agricultural labor are overlooked because legal entitlement is linked to documents that they rarely own.

Caste, Religion, and Landlessness: Intersecting Injustices

Exclusion from disaster aid is not only a gendered problem for Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim women farmers; it is exacerbated by long-standing discrimination based on caste, religion, and class. For example, Adivasi women who were displaced by frequent floods in Assam's Dhemaji district were not given relief because their settlements, which were frequently in rural or forested areas, were not listed in official land or municipal records (Oxfam India, 2015). Whole hamlets fell between the cracks in the state's aid distribution system because of the bureaucratic requirement for "recognized habitation."

Similar trends were seen in Bihar, where Muslim and Dalit women farmers, who were de facto heads of agricultural households, said they were left out of compensation packages following the Kosi floods in 2008. Why? Missing documentation, such as proof of tenancy, ration cards, or property titles, which historically have been inaccessible to vulnerable populations, particularly women within them (ActionAid India, 2023).

This is a structural collapse rather than a gap. In catastrophe administration, the combination of gender, caste, and religion feeds a vicious circle of invisibility. Those at the outside of the administrative and social order are often excluded from relief initiatives because they prioritize formal ownership and bureaucratic legibility. Their voices are further muffled by the fact that these groups are underrepresented in the majority of institutional settings where recovery solutions are developed, such as panchayats, credit cooperatives, and self-help groups (UN Women, 2021). Resilience becomes stratified—reserved for those who are politically connected, socially dominant, and legally visible—in the absence of intersectional policy design and disaggregated data collecting. Vulnerability is institutionalized for the others.

Reform Is Not Optional—It’s Urgent

India is reaching a turning point. The neglect of gendered and intersectional inequities in disaster law is becoming a crisis rather than a policy lapse as climate-induced disasters become more frequent and intense. India's catastrophe governance frameworks will continue to reinforce inequality unless there is immediate, focused legal reform, leaving out the very women who bear the brunt of rural survival and climate adaptation.

• Legal Recognition of Women as Farmers: To clearly acknowledge women as main players, particularly those without official land ownership, the Disaster Management Act of 2005 and the National Policy on Disaster Management of 2009 need to be revised. This entails including legally binding rights to restitution, housing, and compensation in addition to ethereal displays of "gender sensitivity." It is important to recognize women farmers as contributors to rural economies who possess rights rather than as dependents (Choudhary, 2020).
• Intersectional Data Collection: Blind spots in data lead to blind spots in policy. Disaggregated data gathering must be required by disaster planning, not only by gender but also by caste, religion, and tenure status. The most vulnerable are not apparent to relief efforts or adaptation plans without this level of detail (UN Women, 2021).
• Inclusive Governance: Women from underrepresented groups need to be represented in state-level planning organizations, district disaster management authorities, and local panchayats. Every stage of disaster response, from risk assessment to recovery, should be influenced by their personal experiences (ActionAid India, 2023).
• Community-Based Resilience: Self Help Groups (SHGs) should be expanded by the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) as venues for participatory climate adaptation as well as microcredit. SHGs led by women are able to pool resources, create local safety nets, and co-design risk mitigation techniques (Oxfam India, 2015).
• Implement Current Laws: Gender equity measures are already there in existing frameworks such as the Forest Rights Act (2006) and the Land Acquisition Act (2013), but they are not well implemented. Closing the justice gap requires effective implementation, particularly for Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi women (Agarwal, 2021; Menon & Kumar, 2022).

There is no longer any room for legal inertia. It is imperative that climate justice be intersectional, feminist, and immediate.

Conclusion

The most profound disparities in India are revealed and made worse by climate change. Every drought, flood, and displacement furthers the marginalization of women farmers, particularly those who are Dalit, Adivasi, or Muslim. Despite being unnoticed by law and policy, they work the land, provide food for communities, and keep families together during difficult times.

This is structural unfairness rather than a policy oversight.

Mentioning "gender sensitivity" symbolically is no longer sufficient. Women farmers must be acknowledged as owners of rights, not dependents, under India's catastrophe legislation. Climate resilience must be built on a foundation of gender equity.

Erasing the very hands that support the state's rural economy would not help it rebuild more effectively. Tomorrow is not the movement for reform. Now is the time. And legal recognition must be the first step.

References

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