Environmental Justice: How Resource Depletion Affects Marginalized Populations in India

In India, environmental degradation does not affect everyone equally. When forests are cleared, rivers are dammed, or mines are dug, it is overwhelmingly the poorest and most marginalized communities – tribal groups, Dalits, landless labourers, and rural women – who lose their homes, livelihoods, and access to the natural resources they depend on for survival. This unequal burden is not accidental. It is the result of deep structural inequalities in how resources are distributed, consumed, and controlled across Indian society.

The link between marginalization and access to resources 🔗

Marginalized communities in India face a web of interconnected barriers: limited access to healthcare, precarious livelihoods, lower wages, and exclusion from decision-making processes. Their relationship with the natural environment is fundamentally different from that of wealthier, urban populations. For a tribal family in Jharkhand or a fishing community in coastal Kerala, the local ecosystem is not a backdrop – it is their source of food, fuel, shelter, and income.

When that ecosystem is disrupted – through deforestation, industrial pollution, or large-scale development projects – it is these communities that face the most direct consequences. Research published in the Economic and Political Weekly highlights how India’s poor and socially marginalized populations remain heavily dependent on local natural environments for their basic material needs, making them the most vulnerable to ecological degradation. Meanwhile, privileged groups, insulated by their purchasing power and urban infrastructure, experience little of this impact.

Gadgil and Guha’s ecological framework: three categories of people 🔗

To understand who benefits from India’s natural resources and who suffers from their depletion, the ecological framework proposed by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha in their landmark book Ecology and Equity (1995) remains one of the most powerful analytical tools available. They divided Indian society into three ecological categories based on the concept of a “resource catchment” – the geographical area from which a person draws the resources they need to live.

These three categories are: ecosystem people, who depend directly on their local environment; ecological refugees, who have been displaced from their resource base; and omnivores, who command resources from across the globe. This classification reveals how resource conflicts play out repeatedly as communities rooted in their local ecosystems are displaced by development projects driven by the interests of a privileged minority.

Ecosystem people: India’s rural majority 🔗

The largest group in Gadgil and Guha’s framework is the ecosystem people. These are the rural peasants, landless labourers, herders, fishers, forest produce gatherers, and artisans who make up roughly 60% of India’s population. They produce or gather most of their resources from their immediate surroundings – growing their own food, collecting fuel from forests, building their own dwellings, and relying on rivers and local ecosystems for water and livelihood.

Ecosystem people have limited access to modern energy sources, markets, or sophisticated technology. Their ecological footprint is small, and their way of life is often sustainable by necessity. However, they have very limited control over the natural and semi-natural ecosystems they depend on, as these are increasingly being taken over by more powerful groups for commercial exploitation. A farmer in Chhattisgarh or a fisherwoman in the Sundarbans may have generations of knowledge about managing local resources sustainably, yet they have almost no say in government or corporate decisions that determine the fate of those resources.

Ecological refugees: the displaced millions 🔗

When ecosystem people lose access to the natural resources they depend on, they become ecological refugees. This is not a metaphor – it describes a very real process of displacement that has affected tens of millions of people in India. According to Gadgil’s own estimates, ecological refugees constitute roughly 25% of India’s population.

The causes of displacement are varied but share a common pattern. Large dams submerge entire villages. Mining operations destroy forests and contaminate water. Industrial zones take over agricultural land. Deforestation eliminates the source of fuel and fodder. The Narmada Valley Development Project, for instance, comprising 30 large dams, 135 medium dams, and 3,000 small dams, threatened to displace over 200,000 people – predominantly tribal communities – while the benefits of irrigation and electricity flowed primarily to urban areas and wealthy farmers.

Once displaced, ecological refugees are pushed to the margins of urban centres, surviving as hawkers, domestic servants, construction labourers, or manual workers in the informal economy. They lack job security, social protections, and any meaningful political voice. Their livelihoods have deteriorated because artisans have lost access to raw materials like bamboo, herders have been deprived of common grazing lands, fishers find their waters polluted, and peasants watch their wells go dry.

Omnivores: the privileged few 🔗

At the other end of the spectrum are the omnivores – roughly 15% of India’s population. This group includes the wealthy and upper-middle classes, largely urbanites working in the organized sector, along with large landholders, agribusiness operators, and industrial entrepreneurs. The term “omnivore” reflects the fact that these individuals draw resources from everywhere – their resource catchments span the entire globe.

Omnivores have the purchasing power to access goods and services from intensively managed and industrial ecosystems worldwide. They drive the demand for commercial logging, mining, large-scale agriculture, and industrial expansion. Yet they bear almost none of the environmental costs. Their ability to take over resources that ecosystem people depend on directly facilitates the transformation of natural ecosystems into commercial operations, displacing local communities in the process.

As Ramachandra Guha noted in his tribute to Gadgil, this tripartite framework provides a convincing interpretation of political, economic, and environmental change in contemporary India. It exposes how the benefits of economic progress are cornered by a small minority at the cost of the vast majority.

Who is really responsible for environmental degradation? 🔗

There is a persistent myth that poverty causes environmental destruction – that poor communities overuse forests, overgraze pastures, or deplete fisheries. While localized pressures exist, the overwhelming evidence points in the opposite direction. The primary drivers of resource depletion are the consumption patterns of the privileged – both in developing countries like India and in the industrialized West.

Omnivores in India and their counterparts in developed nations drive the demand for goods and services that require massive resource extraction. International supply chains, fuelled by consumerism, funnel resources from the ecosystems of the Global South to the markets of the Global North. Within India, state subsidies, lax environmental regulations, and the exclusion of local communities from environmental decision-making allow powerful industrial and political interests to exploit natural resources with limited accountability.

Gadgil and Guha argued that a sustainable future requires a fundamental shift – not just technological fixes, but a move toward more frugal and equitable patterns of consumption across all segments of society. The responsibility for environmental stewardship cannot be placed on those who consume the least. Instead, it must be shouldered primarily by those whose lifestyles demand the most from the planet.

Environmental justice movements: resistance from below 🔗

India has one of the world’s richest histories of environmental activism, driven largely by the communities most affected by ecological destruction. According to the Environmental Justice Atlas, India records the highest number of environmental justice conflicts globally, with over 300 documented cases. More than 57% of these involve Adivasi (indigenous) communities mobilizing to protect their land and resources.

The Chipko movement of the 1970s, where village women in Uttarakhand physically embraced trees to prevent commercial logging, challenged the entire development model that prioritized commercial exploitation over community needs. The Narmada Bachao Andolan exposed how large-scale infrastructure projects displace marginalized communities while directing benefits to urban and industrial users. More recently, movements like the Dongria Kondh resistance against bauxite mining in Odisha demonstrated that even the most marginalized communities can successfully challenge powerful corporate interests when they organize effectively.

These movements share common threads: they assert community rights over natural resources, they highlight the gender dimensions of environmental harm (women are disproportionately affected as primary collectors of water, fuel, and forest produce), and they insist that local knowledge of sustainable resource management deserves recognition in policy-making.

The multidimensional nature of marginalization 🔗

Understanding environmental injustice in India requires recognizing that marginalization is never one-dimensional. A person’s vulnerability to environmental harm is shaped by the intersection of multiple identities – caste, gender, class, ethnicity, and geographical location all play a role.

Consider the example of a Dalit woman working as an unorganized labourer in Chhattisgarh. She faces caste-based discrimination that limits her employment options and social mobility. She faces gender-based oppression that restricts her decision-making power and access to resources. She faces class-based exploitation that keeps her wages low and her working conditions unsafe. And she faces environmental vulnerability because the forests and water sources her family once depended on have been degraded or taken over by mining and industrial projects.

Each of these power structures reinforces the others. As scholars have argued, marginalization in India cannot be understood through a single lens – caste alone, or gender alone, or class alone. Instead, it requires an intersectional approach that examines how these categories co-construct one another, creating layers of disadvantage that are far greater than any single factor in isolation.

Caste and environmental vulnerability 🔗

Caste plays a particularly significant role in determining who suffers most from environmental degradation in India. Dalit and Adivasi communities are disproportionately concentrated in ecologically fragile regions and in occupations that expose them to environmental hazards. Nearly 95% of manual scavengers in India are Dalit women, a statistic that starkly illustrates how caste, gender, and environmental injustice converge. Existing laws and policies have largely failed to address this through an intersectional framework, perpetuating a cycle of exclusion.

Adivasi communities, who make up less than 9% of India’s population but steward an estimated 80% of the country’s biodiversity, are consistently at the frontlines of environmental conflicts. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 was enacted to recognize the rights of forest-dwelling indigenous communities over their ancestral lands, but its implementation has been slow and uneven, with only a tiny fraction of potential community forest resource rights actually granted.

Gender and environmental injustice 🔗

Women in marginalized communities experience environmental degradation differently and often more severely than men. In rural India, women are the primary collectors of water, fuel, and fodder. When forests are cleared or water sources are polluted, it is women who must walk further, work longer, and bear the physical consequences. Research on marginalized women’s voices in India’s environmental justice movement shows that women’s livelihoods are deeply enmeshed with nature through cultivation, animal husbandry, and craft – yet they are frequently excluded from environmental decision-making.

The Chipko movement was a defining example of this dynamic: women led the resistance because they understood, from their daily experience, the irreplaceable value of the forests being destroyed. Despite their central role, women’s perspectives remain underrepresented in formal environmental policy processes.

Moving toward sustainability: what needs to change 🔗

The path toward environmental sustainability in India cannot be separated from the path toward social justice. As long as the benefits of resource exploitation flow to a privileged minority while the costs are borne by marginalized communities, neither genuine sustainability nor equity is achievable.

Several shifts are essential. First, environmental decision-making must include meaningful participation from affected communities – not just token consultations, but genuine power-sharing in planning and implementation. Second, environmental impact assessments need to account for the cumulative burden of environmental hazards on marginalized communities, considering the intersections of caste, gender, and class. Third, legal frameworks like the Forest Rights Act need stronger implementation to ensure that the rights of ecosystem-dependent communities are actually protected.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the consumption patterns of the omnivore class – both within India and globally – must shift toward more equitable and sustainable levels. Gadgil and Guha’s framework makes clear that environmental sustainability requires not just conservation in isolated pockets, but a rethinking of who consumes how much, and at whose expense.

What do you think? Can India achieve genuine environmental sustainability without first addressing the deep structural inequalities of caste, class, and gender? And in your own community, who bears the greatest burden when the environment is degraded – and who benefits most from the development that causes it?

References

1. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/environmental-injustice-and-public-health-india
2. https://www.routledge.com/Ecology-and-Equity-The-Use-and-Abuse-of-Nature-in-Contemporary-India/Gadgil-Guha/p/book/9780415125246
3. https://india-seminar.com/2014/653/653_madhav_gadgil.htm
4. https://evs.institute/environment-and-society/environmental-justice-movements-india-voices/
5. https://www.theindiaforum.in/environment/madhav-gadgil-1942-2026-peoples-ecologist
6. https://evs.institute/environment-and-society/social-justice-environmental-justice-intersection/
7. https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4745
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