Critically examine how the displacement of tribal communities due to hydroelectric river dam projects has affected the women in local context. Illustrate with suitable ethnographic examples.

What dams do to a tribal household

• Submergence removes jal, jungle, jameen. Women who collected fuel, fodder, fish, and mahua or tendu lose daily income that never appeared as a patta.
• Resettlement sites are often upland, treeless, and far from kin. MGNREGA or wage work may increase, but it is not the same as a river commons.
• Compensation and house plots are usually titled to men. Women become dependents in a new village without natal or marital grove rights.

Sardar Sarovar and the Narmada

• Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada displaced Bhil, Bhilala, Tadvi, Vasava, and related groups in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh.
• Amita Baviskar (In the Belly of the River) described Bhilala life at the river and the moral economy that the reservoir broke.
• Narmada Bachao Andolan (Medha Patkar and local women satyagrahis) made women’s bodies the public face of resistance — water rising in the satyagraha at the dam site — because women stayed when men migrated.
• Health: more distance to water, more vector disease in some colonies, and loss of river protein. Girls’ labour rose as fuel walks lengthened before the move and then as new-site domestic scarcity.
• Bina Srinivasan and NBA documentation recorded that “land for land” often failed women because they were not recorded as cultivators.

Subansiri and the eastern Himalaya

• The Lower Subansiri project (Assam–Arunachal) sits in Mising, Galo, Nyishi, and other downstream and hill catchments. Women in Mising riverine villages depend on the flood pulse for fishing and paddy.
• Fear of dam-break, changed flooding, and outsider labour camps affects women’s safety and mobility. Local protests (including after the 2011 earthquake debates on dam safety) were not only male student unions.
• Elwin’s NEFA worry returns: a road and a dam arrive faster than a woman’s say in Gram Sabha or village council.

Other real cases

• Tehri (Garhwal) displaced hill Hindu and some tribal-adjacent cultivators; women lost terraced fields and walked farther for water in New Tehri’s early years.
• Hirakud (Odisha) and later Polavaram (Andhra–Odisha–Chhattisgarh) hit Gond, Koya, Konda Reddi and others; women’s forest collection was rarely compensated.
• Mapithel / Thoubal (Manipur) and Tipaimukh debates show hill women opposing dams that drown jhum and village graves.
• Indira Sagar and Omkareshwar (Narmada cascade) repeated Sardar Sarovar’s gendered title problem.

Critical point

• Hydroelectricity is framed as national clean power. Locally it is a gendered dispossession. Anthropology should count women’s commons, not only the male acre on the award list.
• PESA and FRA require consent; many dam clearances still treat women as family members, not as rights-holders.