Gender, Environment and Poverty Interlinks in Rural India

This paper analyses the interrelationships between gender, poverty and environmental change in rural India, focusing especially on variations across regions and shifts over time during the past two decades. After briefly identifying the major factors leading to environmental degradation, it traces why and how this degradation and the appropriation of natural resources by the state (statization), and by a minority of individuals (privatization), tend to have particularly adverse implications for the female members of poor rural households. Regional variations and temporal shifts in the intensity of these effects are traced both descriptively and through the specification of an index, termed by the author the GEP index, for measuring gender-environment-poverty vulnerability. Governmental and communityinitiated responses to environmental degradation and natural resource appropriation are also examined, and the necessity of gender-directed policies highlighted.