INDIA'S CLIMATE BLIND SPOT: Women on the Forgotten Frontline

IT IS ALMOST FASHIONABLE now to speak of gender and climate change in policy circles.

- By Srinath Sridharan

Conferences announce panels with earnest titles, strategy documents include the obligatory paragraph on women’s vulnerability, and hashtags proclaim commitment to “leaving no one behind.” But in most cases, this visibility rarely translates into budget lines, institutional reform, or measurable outcomes. Behind the carefully worded statements and glossy reports lies a quieter reality - data that remains uncollected, frameworks that stall at intent, and policy design that drifts comfortably above the ground truths it claims to address.

Gender and climate has become something of a poster child for our era's policy conversation -prominently displayed and widely referenced, but still spared the rigour and urgency reserved for hard infrastructure or finance. Even though resilience begins not just with dams and solar grids, but with who holds the bucket, cooks the meal, or cares for the child when disaster strikes.

It has become so fashionable, in fact, that one could be forgiven for thinking many a retiring bureaucrat is now pivoting to the climate-gender space. Suddenly, hashtags like #climate and #women appear in bios and speeches, as if this new mantle can offset decades of inertia. Many of them had the power to act while in office, but chose not to. Their newfound advocacy, while welcome, often sounds more like a second-act sinecure than a reckoning with what was left undone.

Yet at its rawest edge, the climate crisis is deeply human and profoundly unequal. In India, it magnifies old hierarchies and entrenched inequalities, placing women - particularly those from marginalised and low-income communities - at the sharpest end of its impact. Whether in parched fields or flooded city lanes, the burdens carried by women grow heavier, even as their roles remain invisible in formal plans.