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Paper short abstract

In India’s climate-vulnerable river islands, the cultivation of GMO rice exacerbates ecological and social instability. Women’s unpaid labour sustains cash crops, intensifying gendered violence. Yet women’s collectives create grassroots infrastructures of care, rebuilding ground through solidarity.

Paper long abstract

In the climate-vulnerable river islands of Northeast India, farming communities are experiencing a profound loss of ground - both literal and social. This paper examines how the introduction of genetically modified (GMO) rice has accelerated environmental instability while dismantling traditional forms of social reciprocity. As soils erode, water tables drop, and seasonal floods grow more unpredictable, a parallel unsteadiness takes hold in daily life: women’s agricultural labor, once valued and reciprocated through harvest shares, is now rendered invisible and unpaid.

Focusing on marginalized ethnic minority farming communities in India, the study traces how this double displacement - ecological and economic - intensifies gendered violence and deepens precarity. Yet within these fractures, women are rebuilding ground from below. Through intimate ethnography, we show how local women’s collectives transform from microcredit groups into feminist infrastructures of care, fostering secret savings systems, shared childcare, and cross-class food networks. These practices are not mere survival tactics but vital acts of symbolic and material re-grounding in a landscape where both soil and social trust are eroding.

By holding together the material and social dimensions of “losing ground,” this paper offers a critical lens on how communities navigate entwined crises of ecology and meaning. It argues that in spaces where official systems and stable earth recede, grassroots care practices become essential forms of world-making, offering a fragile but potent terrain for solidarity and repair.