This is a guest post written by Priyanka Samy from IDSN member organization National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) – July 2025

On March 3, 2025, the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) and Women’s Voice convened, “Commemorating Beijing+30: Reflections and Forward-Looking Strategies – A National Assembly of Women from Marginalised Communities” in Bangalore, India.

This historic convening brought together 250 feminist leaders from the Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan, Muslim, LBTIQA+, persons with disabilities, and working-class communities from across 20 states in India. The aim of the meeting was to reflect on three decades of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), assess progress, and co-create strategies for a just, inclusive and intersectional future.

It was a groundbreaking event – the most intersectional and intergenerational feminist convening in recent history. Its depth of diversity and political vibrancy echoed the spirit of the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. This was the largest national-level mobilisation in India led entirely by feminists from historically excluded communities, marking a bold assertion of leadership, solidarity, and transformative vision from the margins.

Honouring Legacy, Confronting Structural Inequities: Since the early 1990s, Women’s Voice and NFDW have played a central role in shaping India’s gender transformative agenda. Women’s Voice, a Dalit women-led grassroot organisation, was a part of the pre-Beijing process since 1993. It serves as the Secretariat of NFDW. NFDW, formed just before the Beijing conference in August 1995, was India’s first national-level network of Dalit women-led grassroots organizations.

The formation of NFDW in 1995 was a watershed moment in both the Dalit and feminist history in India. It marked the first time Dalit women collectively articulated a shared, formidable vision for their liberation and empowerment on a global platform – refusing to remain invisible within mainstream feminist and social justice movements.

Over the past three decades, both organisations have actively engaged in each phase of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) review process from Beijing+5 to Beijing+30, ensuring the perspectives of women at the margins remain visible and central to the feminist discourse.

Reclaiming the Agenda: Collective Strategy from the Margins: The National Assembly served as a platform to take stock of the current moment and shape a collective agenda for action. Participants engaged in deep dialogue on economic justice, gender-based violence, climate change, political participation, the impact of conflict and displacement on marginalised communities among other critical issues.

Key goals of the convening included:

  • Reaffirming the rights and leadership of marginalised women and girls in feminist and development spaces.
  • Strategizing on locally rooted and globally relevant solutions to key challenges.
  • Strengthening networks and solidarity for coordinated national and international advocacy.

Call to Action: Resourcing Justice, Redistributing Power

  • Ensure political and institutional representation of historically excluded women and gender-diverse people across all levels of governance, civil society, and development decision-making. Representation must move beyond mere participation to agenda setting and influence in shaping laws, policies, and resource allocations.
  • Institutionalise the collection, use, and public reporting of intersectional, disaggregated data by caste, class, religion, gender identity, disability, geographic location, among other critical marginalizations—to inform all stages of policy design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Without this, structural inequalities remain invisible, and interventions risk reinforcing existing power hierarchies.
  • Reform labour laws, public finance systems, and social protection schemes to explicitly address the systemic devaluation and exploitation of women’s labour, particularly those engaged in informal, caste-segregated, low-paid, and unpaid care work. Economic policies must recognise, redistribute, and remunerate such labour within a rights-based framework.
  • Embed intersectionality as a core principle in the national review and implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This requires confronting and addressing the compounded effects of casteism, patriarchy, ableism, Islamophobia, heteronormativity, and economic exclusion, rather than treating them as siloed or secondary concerns.
  • Guarantee sustained, flexible, core funding for grassroots feminist and women-led organisations that are embedded in communities and led by those most impacted by structural discrimination. These organizations are critical actors in advancing gender, caste, and economic justice and must be recognised as development partners, not just mere beneficiaries of programs.

Centering Economic Justice: Dalit Women Demand Structural Transformation

Building on the National Assembly’s momentum, NFDW hosted a round-table discussion, “Labour and Economic Justice: Centering the Voices of Dalit Women from South Asia,” on March 12, 2025, on the sidelines of the Sixty Nineth Session of the Commission of Status of Women (CSW69) in New York. It laid bare a hard reality: thirty years since the Beijing Conference, the promise of gender equality remains unrealised for Dalit women across South Asia. The 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) and the 30-year review of the BPfA come at a critical time. Despite global progress, structural barriers persist, especially for women and girls from historically marginalised

As the invisible engine of the informal economy, whether in sanitation, garment factories, agriculture, or domestic labour, Dalit women are systematically exploited, unprotected by labour laws, and invisible in the policy discourse. Their economic contributions fuel economies, yet caste and gender hierarchies continue to devalue their labour and dignity.

Beyond Survival: Dalit Women’s Unrecognised Labour and Resistance

Dalit women continue to experience severe economic exclusion and discrimination. Their work, both paid and unpaid, remains undervalued and unrecognised. They carry the disproportionate burden of unpaid care responsibilities, while formal labour systems deny them fair wages, safe conditions, and protections.

Call to Action: Addressing Structural Inequities in Labour and Policy

  • Guarantee legal protections, labour rights, and social security for informal workers by dismantling caste and gender-based segregation and exploitation in labour markets.
  • Recognize Dalit women as economic and political actors – as workers, unionists, and decision-makers shaping labour and fiscal policy.
  • Advance feminist economic frameworks that prioritise redistributive justice, value unpaid care work, and address systemic exclusions.
  • Embed intersectionality at the core of all policy, budget, and implementation frameworks –

as a fundamental principle.

  • Hold governments and multilaterals accountable to the Beijing Platform for Action, with measurable commitments focused on the rights and needs of Dalit and other historically marginalised communities.

The Road Ahead: A Feminist Future Rooted in Dalit Women’s Leadership

Beijing+30 is not just a milestone; it is a political reckoning. It is a critical juncture to course-correct and confront the structural inequalities that have been ignored for too long. Dalit women demand a bold shift away from rhetoric toward structural transformation. Gender justice cannot be measured by generic progress alone, but by how deeply it disrupts the systems that have excluded Dalit women and other marginalised groups from power, protection, and participation. The future must be shaped by those whose voices have been silenced the longest, and whose leadership now points the way forward.