Technocratic green energy projects often deepen women's land, labour and care burdens.
Women remain excluded from energy decisions despite bearing costs.
Inclusive transition needs land rights, care support and participation.
As governments in India seek to accelerate its low-carbon transition through mega solar parks, wind corridors and household clean energy schemes, the official narrative continues to frame decarbonisation as a seamless “win-win” for economic growth and emission reduction. Yet, emerging field evidence from various Indian states reveals a systemic reality: The gendering of benefits and costs of this transition is deep but rarely part of policy discourse.
In fact, green transition in India is not restructuring gender unfreedom; it is reproducing it, albeit in novel ways. Across four interconnected domains, namely land-use change, green labour markets, household energy redesign and energy governance, women bear disproportionate costs, while remaining mostly excluded from the institutions that shape energy futures. An authentically freedom-enhancing energy trajectory that is thereby ecologically sustainable requires public action to integrate social production and social reproduction by reorganising care work, securing women's collective and individual land rights, and building democratically governed, community-led energy institutions that centre everyday well-being and are therefore financially viable in the long run.
India's decarbonisation ambition is one of the most expansive in the Global South, besides ongoing efforts in countries such as China. It spans, for instance, solar parks in Rajasthan, wind corridors in Gujarat and off-grid electrification drives in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. Official narratives promise a dual dividend: A structural shift away from fossil fuel-dependent production and a demographic inclusion story in which clean jobs and cleaner homes improve women's lives.
Leaving aside significant unanswered questions about the macroeconomic interaction of green investment, demand, income distribution and technology, there remains a significant analytical question about the political economy of the gendering of the green transition. In other words, these official narratives treat gender as a sideshow in the green transition. Instead, gender dynamics and the trajectory of the green transition are jointly determined with other relevant social processes.
Women in India disproportionately undertake the tasks of social reproduction within the family, while exercising at best insecure or informal rights over land, other family resources and common resources. Women undertaking paid work are disproportionately concentrated in the lower reaches of the "precariat" with mostly casualised and low-wage jobs.
Any adverse reconfiguration of land use, production systems, and energy infrastructure will interact with these pre-existing asymmetries — and the evidence surveyed here shows that it does so by deepening, not dissolving, them. Let us see how.
The conversion of common and agricultural land for utility-scale solar and wind installations is the most structurally significant, and possibly the least discussed, in terms of gender consequences of India's renewable expansion. State land-use policy routinely classifies commons as vacant wastelands available for energy investment, treating them as idle assets to be unlocked for enterprise use.
In practice, these lands are not idle. They are actively used by women for grazing livestock, collecting wood for fuel, and gathering minor forest produce. These activities constitute a significant fraction of the process of social reproduction of rural households of the working people.
When access to these commons is severed, the immediate effect is a lengthening of the time expended by such women for social reproduction of their households. This will have adverse consequences for these women themselves in terms of depletion as well as their households in terms of a number of metrics including dietary diversity, healthcare, etc.
The medium-term effect of commons being taken over for setting up solar and wind power installations is that daughters will tend to be withdrawn from schools to substitute for domestic work, either because these adult women are being unsustainably depleted or need to undertake paid work at distress wages. Over time, this dropping out of school by young women will tend to entrench the intergenerational transmission of crises of social reproduction.
Compensation procedures, when peasant land is taken over for setting up solar and wind power installations, compound the exclusion: They are built around formal land title, which women rarely hold in their own name, rendering customary users economically invisible in both acquisition negotiations and resettlement packages.
Solar module manufacturing and rooftop installation are the two green sectors that have absorbed a significant quantum of female labour in India, and both replicate the structure of precarity in conventional export manufacturing.
Women are channelled into soldering, cleaning and packing roles on temporary contracts, at wages frequently below statutory minimum thresholds, without social security coverage or collective bargaining power.
The occupational segmentation is not incidental; it is produced by the conscious design of green skill-building programmes. Vocational training schemes under Skill India have systematically excluded women through entry requirements that presuppose prior technical education and unrestricted personal mobility.
These are conditions that structural constraints on women, given their disadvantageous location in sites of social reproduction, find difficult to satisfy. For instance, the absence of child and elder care facilities and safe transport in production sites acts as a further entry barrier into relatively less precarious roles in green production.
This tends to result in women's participation in green production remaining intermittent and the potential income gains from training are not sustained. The result is a green precarity market that feminises its most precarious tier, whereby women's ascent within the labour process becomes unviable in all but name.
The case for energy-based cookstove programmes and off-grid solar schemes, it is argued, can reduce the drudgery of biomass collection and cooking, which could free up women's time for paid work or greater leisure. However, grounded evaluations of energy-based cookstove programmes and off-grid solar schemes from various states are not unambiguous in their findings.
These household-specific green energy interventions generate new maintenance obligations such as daily cleaning of photovoltaic panels, preparation of dry biomass for improved stoves, and weekly attendance at microfinance or self-help group meetings for loan repayment that fall almost entirely on women. Thus, the time released by lower cooking times is often more than absorbed by other new tasks of social reproduction generated by the household-specific green energy interventions when the overall conditions of social production and social reproduction remain capable of generating, sustaining, and furthering oppression and exploitation. This leaves little or no time for women to undertake paid work or enjoy greater leisure.
Meanwhile, the financialisation of clean energy access through self-help group credit mechanisms embeds women in debt obligations whose default risk falls on group solidarity, converting a programme ostensibly designed to support women into a vehicle that increases their financial vulnerability, which may well increase the combined time allocated by women to both social reproduction and social production, often at distress wages that may accelerate the depletion process.
Underpinning all of these perverse outcomes is the unexamined assumption that energy provision is the responsibility of the household and, within the household, it is the exclusive responsibility of women. The household-specific green energy intervention programmes are premised on this assumption, whereby the claims to the contrary made by the proponents of these intervention programmes from the gender order become unviable.
From gram panchayat electrification committees to the governance bodies of national climate finance funds, women are structurally marginalised in India's energy decision-making architecture. Statutory representation mandates exist but are routinely circumvented: Seats remain vacant, or are occupied by male relatives acting as proxies for female members.
Meetings of such bodies are often convened at times and locations that conflict with the roles of women in the social reproduction process. The practical consequence is that green infrastructure choices, such as renewable energy-based streetlight placement, the green reconfiguration of the timing of rural power supply windows and mini-grid siting as part of the process of green energy diffusion, are made without reference to various metrics of social reproduction such as women's safety needs, home-based livelihood requirements or time budgets.
Energy, even of the green variety, is often treated as a technical input to be optimised for aggregate output, detached from the concrete processes of social production and social reproduction. In practice, this results in a never-ending process of attempts at private profit enhancement.
The absence of women's concrete participation in planning processes does not merely produce inequitable outcomes. It also tends to generate technically inferior outcomes in terms of infrastructure, from a social cost-benefit standpoint, by largely excluding the granular and contextual understanding of how energy processes are actually used in the process of social reproduction.
A degendered, inclusive green transition cannot be assembled through purportedly gender-neutral market mechanisms or cosmetic representational processes. It requires interventions that directly address the structural conditions of social production and social reproduction that produce gendered injustice, including in matters concerning energy.
As far as land is concerned, this means mandatory joint titling in green energy zones, legally enforceable community protocols requiring free, prior and informed consent from women's collectives before acquisition proceeds, and sustainable compensation regimes that recognise customary use rights alongside formal title.
As far as labour is concerned, it means integrating the costs of social reproduction, such as child and elder care, safe transport and drinking water, into green project budgets as non-negotiable components, and restructuring green skill development to remove mobility and educational prerequisites that systematically exclude women.
In matters concerning household-specific green energy intervention programmes, it means subjecting programme design to rigorous time-use analysis and refusing to treat maintenance obligations as cost-free inputs to be absorbed by unpaid female work.
In matters of green governance, it means embedding gender-responsive budgeting across all climate finance initiatives, tying disbursement to measurable mitigation of crises of social reproduction and demonstrable gains in collective resource rights of communities.
Across all four domains, the analytical and political priority is the same: To degender the green transition as part of a broader inclusive transformation of social production and social reproduction.
Trishna Sarkar, assistant professor, deptartment of economics, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, University of Delhi. C Saratchand, professor, deptartment of economics, Satyawati college, University of Delhi. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.