Gendered Impacts of Displacement: Tribal Women and Economic Marginalisation

When a dam is built or a mine opens up in a forest, the story usually gets told in numbers: hectares of land acquired, families relocated, crores paid out in compensation. What rarely makes it into that ledger is a quieter, harder-to-measure loss: the collapse of the economic world that tribal women had built for themselves over generations. For many tribal communities, displacement doesn’t just mean a new address. It means women losing the very ground, literal and social, on which their independence stood.

The economy women built before displacement 🔗

In most tribal regions, women are not incidental to the household economy, they are its backbone. Their work spans shifting cultivation, settled farming, and the daily collection of forest produce, and this labour has historically translated into real decision-making power at home.

Shifting cultivation and settled fields 🔗

In communities that practise shifting cultivation, or jhum, women are involved at almost every stage, from sowing to harvesting, while men typically handle the initial clearing of land. In settled agricultural tribes, women’s labour in the fields is just as constant, often stretching from sowing season through to post-harvest processing. This is not supplementary work fitted around domestic duties. It is core productive labour that tribal economies depend on.

The forest as a woman’s workplace 🔗

Beyond the field, the forest itself functions as an economic resource that women manage. Collection of minor forest produce, such as bamboo, tubers, honey, and medicinal herbs, along with firewood gathering, forms a significant share of household income in many communities, and in areas like the Central Highlands, women make up the overwhelming majority of those collecting these forest products. This income is often controlled directly by the women who gather it, giving them a say in household spending that women in many other rural settings do not have.

This dual role, in the field and in the forest, gives tribal women something economists call autonomy: control over resources and the ability to make decisions about how they are used. It is this autonomy, built over generations, that displacement threatens to unravel almost overnight.

What gets taken when land is taken 🔗

Displacement severs women from both halves of their subsistence economy at once. The field is gone, and so is the forest. What replaces them is rarely equivalent.

From economic partner to economic dependent 🔗

Resettlement and rehabilitation policies in India have historically been built around a single assumption: that the male head of the household represents the family’s economic interests. Compensation for land, jobs promised in lieu of livelihood loss, and rehabilitation packages are almost always registered in the man’s name. Research on displacement policy has repeatedly found that women have little to no independent property rights, and as a result are rarely entitled to compensation in their own right. A woman who once decided how forest income would be spent now has to ask for money that was never hers to begin with.

A pattern seen across projects 🔗

This is not a one-off oversight. A study of the Tehri Dam resettlement found that treating only the male head of household as eligible for compensation created lasting economic strain within families, and this pattern has repeated across large dam and mining projects. In these situations, women’s economic contribution simply disappears from the official record, even though their labour hasn’t disappeared, only their control over its rewards has.

Similar dynamics show up wherever forests are converted for other uses. When traditional forest land is replaced with commercial plantations, women who once met household needs for food, fuel, and income through the forest now have to travel further or buy what they used to gather for free, and their insecure land tenure often keeps them out of decisions about how the remaining land is used.

When the support network disappears too 🔗

Economic loss is only part of the picture. Displacement also dismantles something less visible but equally important: the web of kin and community relationships that rural and tribal women rely on for everyday survival.

The invisible safety net 🔗

In tribal villages, women’s access to scarce resources rarely runs through formal institutions. It runs through people, neighbours who help during illness, relatives who share childcare, a community that steps in during a bad harvest year. Analysts studying forced displacement note that these kin relationships form the primary channel through which women access information, healthcare assistance, and economic support, functions that a formal resettlement colony, however well planned, rarely replaces.

Isolation in the new setting 🔗

Resettlement typically scatters families that once lived as a single community across new, often unfamiliar sites. Neighbours from childhood are gone. The women who used to walk to the forest together, sharing information and looking out for one another’s children along the way, are dispersed. This isolation does not just cause loneliness, it actively increases vulnerability. Without a network to draw on, women are more exposed to exploitation and less able to recover from setbacks like illness or the loss of a wage-earner.

The gendered burden of displacement 🔗

Put economic dependence and social isolation together, and the result is a disproportionate burden of hardship falling on women’s bodies and minds.

Health costs that fall unevenly 🔗

Displaced communities frequently end up in unfamiliar environments with poor access to food security and medical care, and this exacerbates existing health inequities. For women specifically, this hardship compounds through additional pathways, and studies on displacement describe an exacerbated gendered burden of morbidity and mortality among displaced tribal women, on top of documented risks of violence and early marriage that accompany the disruption of settled community life.

Psychological strain, without the old support 🔗

Mental health researchers studying scheduled tribe communities have found that in stable tribal settings, women’s constant, valued responsibilities in agriculture and forest work were actually associated with lower vulnerability to mental illness compared to men. Displacement flips this dynamic. Women retain, or even gain, additional responsibility for family welfare in the new setting, but lose the recognition, resources, and community structures that once made that responsibility manageable. The result is a heavier psychological load carried with fewer tools to carry it.

Is there a way to rebuild what’s lost? 🔗

None of this means tribal women are passive in the face of displacement. Where policy and grassroots efforts have deliberately included women as economic actors in their own right, rather than as dependents of male heads of household, outcomes have looked different.

Recognising women as stakeholders, not dependents 🔗

Programmes that formally recognise women as farmers, not just unpaid family labour, have shown real potential. In Odisha, for instance, an initiative working with Kondh tribal women focused on training them in diversified millet farming and, crucially, on getting them recognised by government systems as farmers in their own right, since this recognition was a precondition for accessing the same benefits and social standing available to male farmers. This kind of formal recognition is exactly what most resettlement and rehabilitation frameworks in India still lack.

Rebuilding networks deliberately 🔗

Policy researchers who work directly with adivasi communities argue that any meaningful response to displacement has to address forest, land, and livelihood as one interconnected issue for women, not as separate technical problems to be solved by compensation cheques. That means building women’s collectives and self-help structures into resettlement plans from the start, rather than leaving women to rebuild their social networks from scratch, alone, in an unfamiliar place.

The evidence is fairly consistent on one point: rehabilitation packages that treat the household as a single male-headed unit will keep reproducing the same gendered gap, no matter how generous the compensation figure looks on paper. Genuine rehabilitation has to account for what women specifically lose, land-based income, decision-making power, and the community networks that made both possible, and rebuild all three deliberately.

What do you think? If compensation and rehabilitation packages were designed around individual entitlements rather than the male head of household, how much of this gendered impact could be prevented? And what would it take for a resettlement plan to actually rebuild a community’s social networks, not just its houses?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/forest-societies-in-India
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14728028.2025.2546599
3. https://indianjournals.com/article/jmpp1-10-1-003
4. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14442210903271312
5. https://www.wrm.org.uy/bulletin-articles/india-plantations-uproot-women-from-their-customary-forests
6. https://science.thewire.in/law/supreme-court-eviction-tribals-displacement/
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8052874/
8. https://unfccc.int/climate-action/un-global-climate-action-awards/winning-projects/activity-database/tribal-women-farmers-as-change-agents-for-environmental-protection-india