Women’s Adaptation Strategies to Climate Stress in Rural Punjab

Abstract

This article examines the autonomous adaptation strategies developed by women in response to climate stress in rural Punjab, a region confronting an acute triple crisis of groundwater depletion, erratic monsoons, and the long-term unsustainability of the wheat-paddy monoculture. Employing an exploratory qualitative design with a comparative case study approach across three agro-ecological zones of Malwa, Majha, and Doaba, the study draws on life-history interviews, participant observation, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews to centre women's lived experiences of negotiating environmental degradation. The findings reveal a sophisticated architecture of survival, encompassing resource pooling and prudent consumption, informal economic coping through self-help groups and micro-enterprises, and a quiet agro-ecological movement of native seed saving and nutrition gardening managed entirely by women. However, the study also exposes a labyrinth of structural limits that prevents these strategies from translating into genuine adaptive transformation. Systemic barriers including the denial of land titles that renders women invisible to formal institutions, exclusion from male-centric agricultural knowledge systems, and the patriarchal capture of adaptive technologies together ensure that women's agency is extracted as a hidden subsidy for a failing agrarian system rather than supported as a pathway to resilience. The analysis demonstrates that these intersecting constraints impose a triple burden on women, securing household survival at the direct cost of their nutritional health, personal leisure, and long-term physical well-being in a process that reproduces gendered vulnerability across generations. The article argues that placing women's knowledge, agency, and rights at the centre of climate policy is not merely a matter of equity but a fundamental prerequisite for building a climate-resilient agrarian future in Punjab.

Keywords: Climate Adaptation, Feminization of Agriculture, Gendered Vulnerability, Groundwater Depletion, Punjab Agriculture, Women's Agency