How women's work shapes India's environmental and social struggles

Two recent films from India look at how women handle tough tasks in rural areas. One follows female leaders running villages in Uttarakhand, showing a hopeful picture where women make key decisions and manage local resources. Yet behind the scenes, these women often depend on government help that isn’t always visible in the film. The other film shows women digging and restoring old water channels to bring back clean water. It treats their hard work as a smart, almost magical way to fix big problems like drought and poor planning. Both films make it seem like women’s daily effort is enough to solve bigger issues, ignoring how much support they actually need.These stories fit into a trend where outside groups praise women’s hands-on work as powerful and independent. But the films skip over how these women still face bigger challenges like land grabbing or weak policies. They focus on small wins rather than asking why these problems exist in the first place. By calling women’s labor an “embodied technology, ” the films suggest their work alone can guarantee success, which oversimplifies real life. On a deeper level, these stories reflect old ideas about who should care for the environment. They highlight women’s roles but rarely question why women are expected to do this work without real change. The films also avoid showing how much these efforts rely on outside funding or policies that may not last. This leaves viewers with a feel-good but incomplete picture of what’s really happening.