Being a woman in the Republic of India is a dangerous prospect thanks to entrenched misogyny that influences everything from violence on the street to extreme orthodoxy in religious institutions. Fighting against these and other causes of gender discrimination is veteran feminist activist Vidya Bal. Bal entered the world of feminism first as a writer and editor with popular woman-centric magazine Stree (the hindi word for woman). Her articulate deconstruction of India's gender bias practices later propelled her to founding the Nari Samata Manch (Women Equality Forum) in 1982. Since then, Ba

Kalawati Devi Rawat is known as the woman who brought electricity to her remote village in the hills of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, writes BBC Hindi's Salman Ravi. It was the early 1980s and she had just been married and moved to Bacher village to live with her husband. The village had no electricity and she found life tough once it got dark in the hills. One day, she led a group of village women to meet government officials at the district headquarters in Gopeshwar to demand that their village be electrified. But the authorities were unmoved. While trekking back to the

The good news for the women’s movement in India came from Munnar, a hill station in Kerala, last month where a group of women workers won a signal battle against their employers, a tea estate by the name of Kanan Devan Hills Plantations. One of the slogans at the protest read: “We pick the tea leaves, we heave the sacks of the tea leaves, you heave the sacks of money leaves, there has to be an end to this.” These protesters did not allow men to be a part of the protest. “Men don’t do the work that we do,” they said. “We are the ones who pluck the leaves, carry the burden

This is the story of an extraordinary uprising, a movement of 6,000 barely educated women labourers who took on one of the most powerful companies in the world. In a country plagued by sexism they challenged the male-dominated world of trade unions and politics, refusing to allow men to take over their campaign. And what's more, they won. You may well have enjoyed the fruits of their labour. The women are tea pickers from the beautiful south Indian state of Kerala. They work for a huge plantation company, Kanan Devan Hills Plantations, which is part-owned and largely controlled by the I

This week a powerful documentary premiered at the Raindance Festival. Driving With Selvi follows a young Indian woman, Selvi, a few months after she pitches up at a women’s refuge center, after running away from her abusive husband. It’s a work that has taken Canadian filmmaker Elisa Paloschi over a decade to complete, as she returned to India again and again to document how such a "powerful girl" reinvented her life after she got behind the steering wheel of a car for the first time. Now the director hopes that the documentary will be used as part of a grassroots campaign in the country t

Women are stretching the existing boundaries of cultural rules that attempt to demarcate a woman’s place in an unequal city Urban redevelopment in India over recent decades has had particular implications for women. While the economic deregulation of the 1990s opened up new possibilities for work, leisure and relationships, it has also led to new stresses. Cities such as New Delhi have become sites for experimentation, autonomy and aspiration for women. Yet against these images of emancipation can be juxtaposed everyday risks and vulnerabilities. Contradictions abound in a space that val