The people who have been at the forefront of ensuring the safety of the forests and water in Himachal Pradesh are the ones whose say over its environmental policies is the weakest. This, for me, is personal knowledge; something that is always there, haunting me.
The Paradox that Just Will Not Disappear
In conducting a study on environmental governance in Himachal Pradesh – not according to policy documents, but as evidenced by the actual happenings at villages, forests, and other locations – there was one particular issue which kept repeating itself. The people who had the largest stake in preserving the environment lacked any sort of power within the governing institutions.
Yet this is far from a mere technicality. It is, in fact, a huge loophole in a system that otherwise works perfectly well.
A Structure that Sounds Great in Theory
Himachal Pradesh, for example, has created an exemplary structure of decentralized environmental governance. There are van panchayats, joint forest management committees, watershed management structures, and even resource institutions of the gram sabhas, and there are mandates in place, but I am not being judgmental here. What I did realize when I examined the question of who populated these positions, who talked, who came up with ideas, and who made decisions, was that it was mostly men.
However, when I asked who woke up before dawn to gather fodder, who walked miles to get water from the spring, who realized that a particular stretch of the forest was thinning out, or which of the plants used for medicinal purposes had disappeared from the hillsides, it was almost always women.
What Rural Women Really Know
Everything I’ve experienced tells me that the knowledge that women possess about ecology is something that no government survey or forest official report could ever match.
For example, a woman who has been collecting fodder from the same area of the forest over three decades knows the place in ways that could never be accessed in any village committee meeting. Women in Lahaul Spiti have observed shifts in glacial source locations in recent decades, and have acted accordingly through modification of daily chores, without any acknowledgment of their contribution. The women of Kangra conserve seeds and employ methods that contribute to maintaining biodiversity within agriculture. The women of Chamba do not see the forest as a map; instead, they see it as an ecosystem in which they interact on a daily basis.
This is not merely contextual information; it is environmental management on the ground.
The Reason That This Exclusion Is Not an Accident
It is particularly difficult for me to accept that such an exclusion is not accidental; instead, it is systematic. Traditional Van Panchayats have never been designed with considerations of gender equality in mind. Meetings of traditional van panchayats are scheduled without considering the childcare duties that women perform in their homes.In terms of land ownership – the silent but extremely influential mechanism for political representation within natural resource governance - men still largely predominate. Furthermore, even if women are formally members of the committee, their presence cannot change the dynamics of power within such organizations; the way who talks first, whose opinion matters, who starts, who decides.
They are there. They simply aren’t listened to.
What Happens When Women Lead
Equally clearly I have seen how things can be when women are truly included.
The impact of water conservation efforts by women's collectives in Spiti could clearly be seen. When women's groups called Mahila Mandals got involved in environmental issues in Kangra, the forests bore testimony to it. It was not about any grand policies being won, but simply about the tangible evidence of the power of women’s environmental stewardship when they are able to practice it. The word 'able' resonates in my mind.
This Is More Than a Gender Question, It’s a Matter of Good Governance
While for me, this discussion does not revolve around gender equality alone because this is equally vital, it also revolves around the issue of governance.
A form of environmental governance that has excluded those who are best informed about nature can never be decentralised governance — it has simply shifted the same exclusions closer to home, bringing decisions to the village level while keeping the village's most informed voices out of the room.
In Himachal Pradesh, the women have already governed the environment; they have done so through their work, knowledge and the way they interact with the environment. The structures governing the environment have just refused to acknowledge the contribution of the same women.
And that needs to change.
(Written as a personal commentary on decentralised environmental governance and gender equality in Himachal Pradesh.)
