Sustainable Development, State Policy, and Gender

Forest is one of the key word or construct of development discourse and recently, in 1992, it has been incorporated in Agenda 21 of Earth Summit where the participation and rights of indigenous people, particularly women, has been emphasised and gender equality has been discursively ensured. With the objective of showing the discrepancies between the statements and actual effect of the policy, following the field investigation this study has found that gender relations prevailing in CHT have been negatively affected following the implementation of the policy and this effect has been intersecting with age, socio-economic status and gender. The outcome was such that the socio- economic gap between different groups within the indigenous community has widened; women, particularly the poor became poorer; old women lost their assets and became subject to the mercy of household members. All in all, development policy instead of developing the indigenous people, it worsened their living conditions, widened the socio- economic gaps and narrowed the bargaining power of women.