India's Green Energy Transition Reproduces Gender Inequality Say Researchers

Academic researchers from the University of Delhi argue that India's renewable energy expansion is deepening rather than dissolving existing gender inequities, with women bearing disproportionate costs in land use, labour markets, household energy programmes, and energy governance. The analysis, published in Down To Earth, calls for structural reforms spanning land rights, care work, and democratic energy governance.

Across four domains, the authors document how green transition policies interact with pre-existing gender asymmetries. Solar and wind installations on common lands sever women's access to grazing, firewood, and forest produce that underpin rural household social reproduction, while compensation procedures tied to formal land title — rarely held by women — render them economically invisible. In green manufacturing, women are channelled into precarious soldering and cleaning roles on temporary contracts below statutory minimum wage, with skill-building programmes excluding them through mobility and education prerequisites.

Household-level clean energy programmes, including improved cookstoves and off-grid solar, generate new maintenance obligations — panel cleaning, microfinance repayment — that fall on women and absorb the time savings promised by the interventions. Women remain structurally marginalised in energy governance bodies from gram panchayat electrification committees to national climate finance boards, with statutory representation mandates routinely circumvented. The authors argue this exclusion produces technically inferior infrastructure outcomes by filtering out granular knowledge of how energy is actually used.

The authors call for mandatory joint land titling in green energy zones, legally enforceable community consent from women's collectives before land acquisition, integration of childcare and transport costs into green project budgets, and gender-responsive budgeting across all climate finance initiatives. The analysis frames these not as equity add-ons but as conditions for an energy transition that is ecologically sustainable and financially viable over the long term.

Key figure — 40,000 Rs — estimated cost to install a charger in an RWA parking spot