She's Electric

Kalawati Devi Rawat is known as the woman who brought electricity to her remote village in India and waged a long battle against the timber mafia.

19:16 21 March 2016

Kalawati Devi Rawat moved to Bacher villager in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand in the 1980s after marrying her husband. The village had no electricity and she found life tough once it got dark in the hills. So, she led a group of women to convince government officials at district headquarters in Gopeshwar to have their village electrified but failed.

 

On their way home, the women came across electricity poles by the foothills that were supposed to be used for an official programme and carried them on their shoulders. The officials, upon learning this, threatened to lodge a criminal case against them but more and more women came forward asking the police to send them to jail. The officials were taken aback and decided to connect the village to the power grid. This marks Mrs Rawat’s first victory.

 

Over the past three decades, she has taken on the timber mafia in the nearby forests and campaigned against alcoholism among men in her village.

 

She said: "Many men in and around my husband's village were alcoholics and they were being exploited by the timber mafia gangs that operated in the area. One morning, I went into the forest along with the other women to fetch cattle fodder when I saw that all the trees were marked with a chalk to be felled later.

 

"We felt that something needed to be done to save the trees and the Taantri forest - the only source of sustenance for the hill villages," 

 

"They first tried to bribe us and when that failed, they threatened us. We also protested before the district authorities, held sit-in demonstrations and finally the officials passed an order not to fell the trees," she says.