Uttarakhand is home to the fierce ‘Chipko Movement.’ Led by the bold and spirited women in the 1960s, the movement was one of the many significant attempts to bring to light the relationship between women’s rights and environmental justice in its fight against large scale deforestation.In recent times, we see inspired and motivated elected women representatives in Gram Panchayats ( India’s elected village councils) carrying forward the legacy of the Chipko movement as they rally around to strengthen the unique Uttarakhandi institution of Van Panchayats (forest councils).In early 2017, during the course of several meetings organized by The Hunger Project,

“These capitalists will ruin us,” thundered Charanjeet Kaur, a thirty nine year old farmer with a medium landholding of 12 acres (4 hectares) from Wara Bhaika village in Faridkot district of Punjab. “Instead of bridging the gap between the rich and poor, government is trying to get rid of the poor altogether,” she told BehanBox on a mid December morning at Tikri on the Delhi-Haryana border–one of the two sites of the groundswell of protests against the new farm laws legislated by the Government of India.Sat beside her, Manjeet Kaur (40), a small farmer with 2 acres (0.8 hectares) landholding

Neeta (name changed), a cane cutter in one of the many sugarcane farms in Beed district of central Maharashtra, was only in her early 30s when she was forced to undergo a hysterectomy.Her menstrual period was a difficult one with severe pain in her abdomen that lasted several days. Her flow was heavy and she also had severe itching and foul odour in her vagina. On the fields where she worked, there was no place for her to change the basic cloth pads she used during her menstrual period. After months of unbearable pain, Neeta decided to forfeit a day’s

Transgender persons in India’s prison systems  remain invisible among all the vulnerable groups, with their rights and dignity as citizens denied, according to a new report “Lost Identity: Transgender Persons Inside Prisons” by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) and  University of Dundee.Take the case of Ishu, a transwoman, who was incarcerated when she was 19 in  Bengaluru Central Prison on charges of attempted murder and abduction in 2017. Inside the prison, she developed a serious infection after a breast augmentation surgery a few months prior to her arrest. Her situation worsened as the prison officials administered generic painkillers. She

As India announced one of the harshest lockdowns in the world, among the many groups that remained invisible in the government policy announcements were menstruating persons. Hygiene essentials for menstruating persons were missed out in the essentials list of items and services announced by the government. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in an affidavit filed in the Bombay High Court in response to a petition seeking that sanitary products be declared an essential commodity, said such a decision could only be taken after due process of assessing the demand and supply gap. Disposable pads were added to

“Tum gareeb ho, tum rehne do. Waise bhi tum jhoota case likha rahi ho toh case nahi likha jayega” (You are poor, so you shouldn’t pursue this case. Since this is a false case, we will not register it)- a 30 year old woman from the Scheduled Caste was told when she went to report her rape in a police station in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in  June 2019. She returned a few days later, to file a First Information Report (FIR) only to be told by the Station House Officer (SHO) that he had misplaced her original statement. The police