The picture is one of several being exhibited in London this month by photographer Srinivas Kuruganti, illustrating life in Jharkhand state, where underground fires sparked by coal mining have raged for nearly a century and displaced communities.

Kuruganti’s fascination with the impacts of coal mining in northeast India started with a short bus ride he took in 1999, from the city of Varanasi to a small town called Chandasi, the biggest coal depot in Asia.

“Hundreds of men and women spend all day shovelling and carrying coal in and out of trucks,” he said.

“The air is so thick with fine particles of coal dust that all shops, houses and roads are coated black. I spent a few days there but was left feeling that there was more I wanted to know.”

His striking photographs form part of “Shifting Landscapes,” an exhibition which also depicts the fast-changing landscapes of China through the lenses of husband and wife photographers Max and Liz Haarala Hamilton.

UNDERGROUND FIRES

Despite its rampant industry, Jharkhand is one of India’s poorest states, with Kuruganti citing estimates that more than half the state does not have access to clean drinking water. World Bank data from 2007 showed 59 percent of children there were malnourished.

Another of Kuruganti’s exhibited photos, showing two people perched on the edge of a dumpsite carrying baskets, depicts another aspect of life in the coal belt. Locals in the city climb down perilously dangerous slopes of dumpsites collecting coal, which they rely on for heating and fuel.

Elsewhere in Jharkhand, uprooting families in the town of Jharia, underground coalfield fires have burned since the early 20th century.

Mining in India displaced about 2.6 million people between 1950 and 1991, according to a 2008 report by the Centre for Science and Environment in India. Fewer than a quarter of them have been rehabilitated, the report added.

Unregulated mining in Jharkhand state has converted forests into wastelands and made the region uninhabitable for the local people from the Adivasi tribal group, who rely largely on the forests for sustenance, Kuruganti said. According to estimates over a million Adivasis were displaced between 1950 and 2000, he added.

“You look at who pays the price for economic development”, said Kuruganti. “It’s always the people in the village, by being displaced, or their land is taken away.”

The exhibition, which is in conjunction with east London photography festival “Photomonth,” runs from Oct 15-30 at London’s Gallery S O.

(Editing by Emma Batha and Paul Casciato)

In an Istanbul conference room of sex workers and women’s rights experts, a black and white silent film sparks waves of laughter.

Instead of the likes of Charlie Chaplin, the film’s star running across the screen to upbeat music is a woman escaping police as they raid a bar for sex workers. After chasing her in circles, the police arrest her, only for her to return to the bar again anyway.

But laughter is absent in the room during the next short clip – a short film purportedly showing a real raid on sex workers.

The visible distress of one of the women who is arrested in the clip, the loud banging of their hands against the bus into which they are carted, sobers the mood in the session at the biggest women’s rights conference in the world.

One speaker at the session, Laura Agustin, an anthropologist and author of “Sex at the Margins,” criticised what she calls a “rescue industry” that she said often unnecessarily removes women from sex work.

Governmental and non-governmental agencies often do sex workers more harm than good by removing them from this work, she argues.

“Now they don’t have the livelihood that they had, this makes no sense at all,” she said at the International Forum of the Association For Women’s Rights In Development (AWID).

While she does not contend that some women are forced into sex work, she argues that most sex workers are not “incredibly enslaved.” The term “sex slaves” is used too widely to describe women in the industry, she said.

“There are large amounts of money that go into these programmes to rescue people who in many, many, many cases do not want to be rescued,” she said, adding that many women choose sex work as a preference to jobs such as domestic work.

“We’re talking about the ability to recognise that someone else can make a different decision from your own about her economic or mental or emotional empowerment,” she added. “That if you want to rescue someone you need to know very well first what it is that they want before you rush in to help them.”

At the other end of the spectrum, others argue sex slavery is rife. Such as Siddharth Kara, author of “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.”

There were 28.4 million slaves in the world at the end of 2006. Of these trafficked slaves, 1.2 million were sex slaves, he said in an interview on Columbia University Press’s website.

A 2009 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that sexual exploitation accounts for as much as 79 percent of human trafficking. Victims of sexual exploitation are predominantly women and girls.

But trafficking, too, is a word used too broadly, Agustin said. Many women forcibly removed from the sex industry had consented to their work and so don’t need rescuing, she argued. Many women in the industry are part of what she prefers to call “undocumented migration.”

“SPIED ON… INTERROGATED”

In her blog – The Naked Anthropologist – Agustin points to the words of Empower Foundation, an organisation in Thailand fighting for the rights of sex workers:

“We have now reached a point in history where there are more women in the Thai sex industry who are being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women being exploited by traffickers,” the foundation said in a report it released this year.

“We are forced to live with the modern lie that border controls and anti-trafficking policies are for our protection,” it added.

“We have been spied on, arrested, cut off from our families, had our savings confiscated, interrogated, imprisoned and placed into the hands of the men with guns, in order for them to send us home… all in the name of ‘protection against trafficking’.”

Being a sex worker is a matter of choosing the best option on the menu in your life, one woman at the session tells the room:

“At a restaurant you get a menu and you look at all the options before you pick out your selection, according to your preference,” she said.

“Some restaurants have a huge menu and some only have a few dishes – either way the process is the same. Vegetarians may not understand when you choose a steak, and others may not understand when we choose to do sex work.”

Echoing Agustin’s views on raids unwelcomed by some sex workers, were the words at the close of the black and white silent film:

“We hope that’s the end,” it read.

Picture credit: Sex workers smile during the all India conference of entertainment workers in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata February 25, 2007. REUTERS/Parth Sanyal

Worldwide, women battle patriarchal systems daily to own what is rightfully theirs, be it their right to land or household finances – as highlighted by delegates at the world’s largest global women’s rights conference in Istanbul this week.

Yet when it comes to women and girls who have suffered sexual violence, the property they often strive to reclaim is their own body.

So how can women regain a sense of ownership over bodies that have been physically and emotionally shattered?

Among several strategies to empower women, discussed at the International Forum of the Association For Women’s Rights In Development (AWID), art is one approach for treating survivors of sexual violence.

“Women who are victims of sexual violence cannot embrace and celebrate their bodies,” Alma Quinto from the Philippines, co-founder of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that uses art to rehabilitate abused women and girls, told TrustLaw at the conference.

“They see their body as fragmented, they consider it as dirty. They do not own it, they have no control over it,” said Quinto, who has worked with survivors of sexual abuse in the Philippines, Japan and South Korea.

For women who struggle to talk about abuses they experienced, it can be easier to express themselves through creativity, said Quinto of the NGO House of Comfort Art Network (ARTHOC).

But in the Philippines, stigma deters abused women from asking for help, she said.

“It’s difficult if there is no support from the local government in terms of shelter or temporary refuge and if the woman victim still sees her abuse as an issue within the confines of her home and that outside intervention is not needed,” she said.

But, she added, as women garner more information and support from NGOs, the media and government social agencies, they assert their rights and fight for justice.

Through her “House of Comfort Art Project,” she teaches women to create miniature houses out of scrap materials.

“These women… need a refuge, a shelter, a comfortable place,” said Quinto, adding that in real life a house can be a prison or a comfort.

“We learn our basic values at home but it is also there that abuse takes place,” she said.

But through art, Quinto is helping women and girls to build up more positive experiences in their minds, she said. The hope is that then, bit by bit, they can once again feel in control of their own bodies.

“As their art becomes bolder, colorful and definite, their self-esteem improves,” she said.

“As they become creative, they can mold and reshape their lives, put colors into their grey existence.”

Photo credit: A man holds a sign during the 10th annual Walk A Mile In Her Shoes to raise awareness against sexual violence in Plaza De Cesar Chavez in San Jose, California April 18, 2012. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

People funding initiatives to tackle climate change effects would channel money towards the worst-affected people, right? And towards those who play key roles in mitigating the effects of climate change?

It certainly sounds logical. But in reality, many donors aiming to help communities to weather climate change often overlook the needs of women. So says Mariama Williams, a senior fellow at the Geneva-based South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries.

Distributing funds in the area of climate change “has to have a gender dimension,” Williams told delegates at a women’s rights conference in Istanbul on Thursday.

“In most countries women are very much impacted by climate change,” she said at the conference organised by the Association for Women’s rights in Development (AWID).

The figures say it all. During extreme weather events, more women die than men, she said, citing research by the London School of Economics.

Women are often hardest hit by natural disasters because the effects of climate change exacerbate pre-existing gender discrimination, she said.

Often being chief carers of children and the elderly, women are the last to leave home when a natural disaster hits, she said, adding that women also often have less access to information about natural disasters.

“Having access to good roads and bridges that allow mobility during floods or other extreme events is a matter of life and death to women who are also responsible for children and the elderly,” according to South Centre. “In addition, access to public outreach and early warning saves lives and prevents illness.”

MITIGATING

But women aren’t just the worst hit by natural disasters– they are also often the community members who play a major role in mitigating climate change’s effects.

“A lot of the activities that women do in developing countries also are … cheap forms of mitigation that we need to upscale and encourage and put more money in,” Williams says, citing activities such as planting trees.

Indeed, the need to channel more of climate change funding towards women is no-brainer.

In the words of South Centre: “Women’s empowerment cannot successfully and sustainably occur without proactive attention to resolving the challenges of climate change.”

But, first and foremost, the fact is that climate experts and activists still face huge barriers in getting leaders to acknowledge climate change’s gravity at all. Until the world takes on board the urgency of the problem, communities – and especially women – will continue to suffer from worsening effects of natural disasters.

“When we say climate change, it’s not an esoteric thing that is to come, it is happening,” Williams said. “Extreme weather, storms, cyclones… heat waves, floods drought – it’s here, and it’s manifesting itself more in developing countries.”

Following are key recommendations Williams made on more gender-balanced climate change financing:

* A need for programmes that leverage women’s organisations to implement and manage climate change initiatives, locally, nationally, regionally and globally.

* Proactive actions by gender advocates to secure, at national and global levels, new and increased funding for women’s empowerment and gender equality interventions in the climate change arena.

* A need for gender impact assessments in the arena of climate change and a process towards developing gender-sensitive climate change financing indicators. Emphasis should be placed on positive incentives for funds that finance projects and programmes that enhance gender equality.

Photo credit: A woman walks in a dried field at Dala township April 18, 2012. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun