When studying the status of women in Garhwal and Kumaon, we must disentangle the realities from the myths, including those that have emerged from the Chipko Andolan. 'Development' has sidelined women even though they have formed the backbone of the subsistence agriculture of this region. The hill women are becoming more, not less, dependent upon their menfolk.
Over the last two decades, the 'gender perspective' has become an accepted part of mainstream development thinking and rhetoric. However, in looking back over the experience of the hill, districts of Uttar Pradesh, one is forced to conclude that women here remain 'invisible'. One reason the marginal status of women is being perpetuated seems to be the apparent reluctance at the policy level to learn from a wealth of empirical and conceptual insights about the gender implications of development efforts gained in other agro-ecological contexts. Policies that are made remain insensitive to women's contributions to the rural economy, their access to productive resources, and the constraints they face in performing their roles as agriculturalists and subsistence providers.
It was the 1975 United Nations International Conference on Women that brought women's issues to the forefront of governmental, academic and activist concern. Two parallel developments during the 1970s also injected a greater "gender sensitivity" to the study of Himalayan communities. The first was there cognition of the ecological and socio-economic crisis facing these mountain areas, which was reflected in over-exploitation of the natural resources, a widening gap between subsistence production and consumption requirements, increasing dependence on the external market economy and, alongside, increasing out-migration of males and the emergence of the 'money-order' economy.
The second development was, of course, the Chipko Andolan, a grassroots initiative at gaining people's control over forests in pockets of the Uttar Pradesh hills. The fact that women were so often at the forefront of community organising in the Andolan highlighted their ability to mobilise to protect the sources of their subsistence livelihoods.