If development is not engendered, it is endangered.

Half the Sky, Whole the Future

In March 1974, in the village of Reni in the hills of Uttarakhand, contractors arrived to fell the forest on which the villagers depended. The men were away. Gaura Devi and a group of women went into the forest and stood between the axes and the trees, and the loggers withdrew. The Chipko movement that grew from such acts became a global symbol of ecological resistance. It also carried a lesson that development economists took two more decades to put into words. In 1995, the year of the Beijing World Conference on Women, the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report declared that human development, if not engendered, is endangered. Development that ignores half its people is not merely unjust but unstable: it wastes talent, weakens families, damages the environment and erodes the legitimacy of the State, so that engendering development is not a concession to women but a condition for development itself.

To "engender" development means to build gender into its design from the start: in how problems are defined, how budgets are drawn, who takes decisions and how outcomes are measured. It is different from adding a women's scheme at the end of a plan. The shift mirrors the move in development thinking from "women in development", which treated women as beneficiaries, to "gender and development", which looks at power relations between women and men. Amartya Sen's capability approach, set out in Development as Freedom (1999), gives the deeper reason: development is the expansion of the real freedoms people enjoy, and a process that leaves women less free than men is, by definition, incomplete.

The economic case is the most direct. An economy that keeps half its working-age population out of paid work is running on one engine. The McKinsey Global Institute estimated in 2015 that India could add about 700 billion dollars to its GDP by 2025 if it advanced women's equality in work. The female labour force participation rate, only 23.3 per cent in the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18, has risen to about 41.7 per cent in 2023-24, yet much of this work is unpaid or informal. East Asian economies grew rapidly in part because young women entered factory work in large numbers, and Bangladesh's garment industry, built largely on women's labour, transformed its export economy. Where women are excluded, growth runs into a ceiling of unused talent and lost demand.

Moreover, development of human beings depends even more on women than development of output. Educated mothers are more likely to immunise their children, seek antenatal care and keep daughters in school, so that the gains of one generation are carried into the next, an intergenerational multiplier that no other investment matches. Kerala, which invested early in female literacy, achieved health and demographic outcomes comparable to far richer societies. The opposite is equally clear. Sen's estimate of 1990 that more than 100 million women were "missing" from the world's population, and India's child sex ratio of 918 in the Census of 2011, show how a society that devalues daughters creates distorted demography whose costs, from trafficking to unrest among unmarried men, fall on everyone.

The environmental dimension shows that the danger is not only to welfare but to survival. Rural women are the first to suffer when wells dry up, forests shrink or floods destroy crops, because they collect water, fuel and fodder. They are also often the most careful stewards. From Gaura Devi in Chipko to Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which planted tens of millions of trees, women have led the defence of commons. Smoke from traditional stoves was itself a gendered health hazard, which is why the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana of 2016 targeted LPG connections at women in poor households. A climate policy that does not see women misses both its most vulnerable citizens and its most effective agents.

Building upon this, governance itself improves when women share power. A well-known study by Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, published in 2004, found that in panchayats reserved for women pradhans in West Bengal and Rajasthan, more was invested in drinking water, the public good women had prioritised. The 73rd Amendment of 1992 brought women into local government through reservation, and the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam of 2023 extends the promise to Parliament and the State assemblies after delimitation. India introduced gender budgeting in the Union Budget of 2005-06, requiring ministries to show how spending reaches women. These are the instruments of an engendered State; where they are weak, policies are designed by and for the half that is in the room.

The social fabric is the final test. Development that raises incomes while leaving violence, dowry and early marriage untouched breeds a dangerous mismatch between material progress and social values. Women who earn but cannot move freely, who study but cannot choose whom to marry, experience modernisation as a new set of pressures rather than a release. Self-help groups such as Kerala's Kudumbashree, launched in 1998, show the alternative: when women control credit and collective enterprise, they gain both income and a voice in the gram sabha, and social change follows economic change.

Yet the slogan must be read with care. Engendering development does not mean treating women only as instruments of growth, valued because they raise GDP or lower fertility. Feminist scholars have criticised such "smart economics" for asking women to carry the burdens of development while their own aspirations come second. A scheme that hands a woman a loan but leaves her with all the housework may add to her load rather than her freedom. Gender, moreover, is not a synonym for women. Men's roles in care and their own vulnerabilities, from risky work to rigid masculinity, are part of the picture, and the Supreme Court's recognition of transgender persons in NALSA v. Union of India (2014) widened the very meaning of gender in Indian law. An engendered development is one where women are not only means to progress but its authors and its ends.

The path forward, then, runs through several reforms at once. Gender-disaggregated data must guide every major programme, so that outcomes are measured rather than assumed. Investment in the care economy, through creches, paid parental leave and support for the elderly, would release women's time for paid work. Safe transport, digital access and property in women's names would turn formal rights into real choices. And leadership must change: when women sit in cabinets, boardrooms and courts, development is designed with their realities in mind.

Gaura Devi did not read development reports, but she understood something that took economists decades to measure: the forest, the family and the future were tied together, and women held many of the threads. Sustainable Development Goal 5 and India's own constitutional promise of equality in Articles 14, 15 and 16 point to the same truth. A nation that aspires to be developed by 2047 cannot reach that goal with half its people walking a step behind. Development that is engendered is development that endures; development that is not will remain, in the words of the 1995 report, endangered.