Collective Agency and Climate Resilience: How Women-led Institutions are Redefining Adaptation in Rural India?

CHANDRALIM PHUKAN

Discussions on climate change has long framed women as among the most vulnerable populations, emphasising their disproportionate exposure to climate vulnerabilities due to socio-economic inequalities. While this framing is not inaccurate, it is incomplete. Across rural India, women are not merely passive recipients of climate impacts; they are actively engaging as the very architect of adaptation. This transformation has been possible through women collective institutions such as Self-Help Groups (SHGs), and Cluster-Level Federations (CLFs)which have emerged as critical platforms enabling women to break institutional barriers and engage in local climate solutions. In doing so, these women collectives are not only responding to climate risks but also challenging deep rooted institutional systems of exclusion from benefits and protection.

A defining feature of these collectives is their ability to bypass gendered exclusion. Agricultural relief, credit markets, and subsidies often remain inaccessible to women due to unequal land ownership, bureaucratic red tape, and entrenched patriarchal norms. A primary constraint is land ownership itself: despite women’s significant contribution to agriculture, only about 14% of operational landholdings are in their names. Since most government schemes such as Kisan Credit Cards (KCC), input subsidies, and crop insurance are conditional upon land titles, most women farmers are effectively excluded from formal support systems.

This exclusion is evident across major welfare schemes. Beneficiaries under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) are identified through land records, which are overwhelmingly registered in men’s names, leaving women cultivators and tenant farmers unrecognized. Similarly, under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), insurance payouts are transferred to the registered landowner’s account, excluding women who cultivate leased or family land.

In districts such as Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, tenant women farmers have reported being unable to claim compensation for crop losses because the insured farmer on record was a male relative or landlord.

Likewise, under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), although women constitute over half of the workforce nationally, delays in payments and the routing of wages into male-controlled accounts affecting up to 40% of women workers which continue to limit their financial autonomy.

Systemic exclusions have direct implications for climate resilience. As climate volatility intensifies through erratic rainfall, droughts, and crop losses access to timely credit, insurance, and agricultural inputs becomes critical for adaptation. Women’s systemic exclusion from these support systems limits their ability to invest in climate-resilient practices, adopt new technologies, or recover from climate-induced shocks. As a result, institutional barriers do not merely reinforce economic inequality; they actively constrain women’s adaptive capacity, increasing their vulnerability to climate risks.

However, it is precisely within these constraints that collective platforms become transformative. Collective women-led agency platforms enable women to pool financial resources, access credit, and share knowledge, thereby encouraging independence during crucial/ emergency period. Evidence shows that such groups function as knowledge hubs, financial intermediaries, and vehicles of grassroot leadership, enabling women to access technologies and practices that would otherwise remain out of reach.

In Cooch Behar a district in West Bengal, India women organized into SHGs, and Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) collectively accessed zero-tillage machinery, a specialized planting equipment, such as no-till drills or planters, designed to sow seeds directly into unploughed soil without prior seedbed preparation. It cuts through surface crop residues, creates narrow furrows, places seeds and fertiliser, and covers them in one pass, minimizing soil disturbance, reducing costs, and conserving moisture. Such interventions significantly improved productivity while reducing climate risks.

Similarly, in districts of Mirzapur and Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh India, women-led SHGs facilitated and actively encouraged the adoption of biofortified mustard (BFM) specifically varieties such as Pusa Mustard 30 among the rural agricultural community. Compared to conventional crops, BFM offers significant advantages, including higher yields (by nearly 28–30%), lower water dependency, and improved nutritional outcomes due to enhanced Vitamin A content. Its suitability for water-scarce and climate-stressed regions makes it a promising adaptation strategy.

Beyond access, collective agencies have enabled women to co-create and localise climate solutions, combining traditional ecological knowledge with modern innovations.

The case of the Bibi Fatima Sangha in Dharwad, Karnataka, is illustrative. This women’s collective established a community seed bank conserving over 300 indigenous millet varieties and set up a solar-powered processing unit that handles 30 quintals of millets weekly, providing value-added products like vermicelli, and aiding farmers with machinery to process brown top, foxtail, little, and proso millets. The initiative has strengthened food security for thousands of farmers while creating sustainable livelihoods. Bibi Fatima Sangha won the 2025 UNDP Equator Prize (often called the “Nobel Prize for Biodiversity“) for their active efforts towards climate effective solutions.

The 2025 Equator Prize winners exemplify the year’s theme, “Nature for Climate Action,” with a special focus on youth- and women-led climate action.-Photo: Bibifathima Swa Sahaya Sangha

Similarly, in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, women trained as “Krishi Sakhis” have taken on roles as grassroots agents, providing agronomic advice, facilitating access to inputs, and even supporting legal awareness around land rights. More than 5,000 women in coastal and tribal areas of Gujarat are benefiting from sustainable farming practices.

The influence of the collectives extends beyond economic or environmental outcomes into the realm of social transformations as well. Rural institutional landscapes of India are dominated by caste hierarchies, unequal land ownership and entrenched gender norms that systematically marginalise women, particularly those from Dalit and Adivasi communities. Collective institutions offer an alternative space where these hierarchies can be negotiated and, in some cases, even disrupted.

In regions such as Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, women’s collectives have developed forest-based enterprises such as the processing and marketing of non-timber forest produce (NTFP) like mahua, lac, and tamarind despite lacking formal land titles. In Jharkhand alone, women-led producer groups supported under NRLM (National rural Livelihood Mission) have enabled thousands of Adivasi women to engage in forest produce activities, increasing incomes by 20–30% in certain SHGs.

However, the emergence of these collectives also exposes a critical gap in climate governance. While grassroots innovations demonstrate the effectiveness of decentralised, gender-responsive approaches, formal policy frameworks have remained gender-blind. National and state-level climate strategies have only recently begun to acknowledge the role of women, often without fully integrating their lived realities.

For instance, India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), while comprehensive in outlining sectoral missions on agriculture, water, and energy, initially made only limited and indirect references to gender. Women have largely been framed as vulnerable beneficiaries rather than active agents of adaptation, with little attention to issues such as land rights, access to credit, or unpaid care burdens that are primary to understand their adaptive capacity.

At the state level, several State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCCs) have incorporated gender considerations in more recent revisions; however, these often remain descriptive rather than operational. For example, while states like Madhya Pradesh and Odisha acknowledge women’s vulnerability in climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture and water collection, there is limited specification of budgetary allocations, institutional mechanisms, or gender-disaggregated indicators to ensure meaningful inclusion. As a result, women’s roles continue to be underrepresented in decision-making processes, particularly at local governance levels. As a result, there exists a disconnect between broad policy imagination and policy intervention.

Women’s collectives in rural India represent a quiet yet impactful shift in the landscape of climate adaptation. By overcoming institutional barriers, encouraging innovation, and enabling social transformation, SHGs and CLFs have positioned women as primary agents of resilience rather than passive victims of climate change. Their success challenges conventional, top-down approaches to adaptation and urges the need for a paradigm shift in climate policy one that moves towards inclusion and localised solutions.

Chandralim Phukan is a Research Associate at The Energy and Resources Institute, working on climate policy, green economy transitions, and sustainable development. She hold an MSc in Political Economy and Development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work focuses on gender, climate resilience, and grassroots development, with experience in promoting women-led enterprises in rural India.

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