"In the salt flats of Gujarat, India, an unlikely green revolution is underway. With support from trade union SEWA, thousands of informal salt farmers are swapping diesel pumps for solar power – cutting emissions, raising incomes and proving that the path to net zero can bring both environmental and economic transformation.
As you reach for the salt shaker at dinner tonight, pause for a moment to consider those fine white crystals. They may represent the final stage of a journey that starts in a harsh, unforgiving world few ever see.
These crystals could well derive from the blistered salt flats of Surendranagar, in the western reaches of the Indian state of Gujarat. For generations, families like Manguben Dhirubhai Jaga’s have toiled from dawn to well past dusk in the 45ºC heat and blinding sun to produce one of the world’s most essential and undervalued minerals. And thanks to climate change, their lives are only getting tougher.
“Salt is everything here,” Manguben tells the JUST Stories team as she crouches beside a large rectangular earthen pan filled with evaporating brine. She scoops up a handful of large pearly white cuboids, one of nature’s wondrous geometric forms; her face wrapped in a thin scarf to protect against the unrelenting glare. “We don’t go to the office. This” – she gestures to the gleaming desert – “is our office.” The ground is parched and fissured like cracked porcelain; but in the distance, flamingos dot a flooded plain, an ominous sign for the salt farmers – despite its refreshing relief, early rain can ruin a salt harvest.
A grime-encrusted diesel-powered pump sits quietly by one of the nearby pans – a once essential cog in the process; both a blessing and a curse for the women, and a pernicious source of carbon emissions weighing heavily on India’s net zero transition. “We used to spend everything we earned on diesel and repairs,” Manguben says. “There was nothing left at the end of the season.” She recalls the engine breaking down mid-season, the belts snapping, and how they would have to wait days for a mechanic to come from the nearest town. “One year, it didn’t start for ten days. We lost so much time and income.”
India is the world’s third largest salt producer, 80% of which comes from these inland salt flats in Gujarat. The vast majority of the workforce here are women like Manguben, but for decades they have received a pittance for their back-breaking labour; reliant on extortionate loans to buy diesel at inflated prices at the start of the season and forced to sell their salt at rock-bottom prices by exploitative middlemen.
At just 26 years old, Manguben has already spent over a decade working under the harsh conditions of the salt farms. Every year, she and her family of ten migrate 40 kilometres from their village to the desert, where they will live in a chhapara – a makeshift hut made of sticks and tarpaulin – for the next eight months. The women sleep inside and the men under the stars. Her day starts at 7am with a quick breakfast of bajri no rotlo (millet roti) and black tea. And then she’s straight into the brine: repairing lining, fixing leaks in pipes, monitoring water levels, stamping down and raking the salt in her bare feet to create the perfect size crystals. She breaks at midday to have a simple lunch of rice and dhal, before returning to the pans – only stopping when the stars start to glimmer in the sky.
There is no running water. No electricity. No shade. “We work with our feet in saltwater all day,” she says. “It burns when you have cuts. But there’s no choice – you have to keep going.” Manguben’s hands are painted white with salt, with water too precious to wash them – their supplies are only for drinking, and sparingly. After a few hours in the desert your skin starts to feel sticky and clogged, like you’ve been bathing in the sea. Manguben now travels home for a weekly shower, a luxury that she has only recently been able to afford.
But, as for most of the two billion unregistered, untaxed and unprotected workers that comprise the world’s informal economy, that’s just the way it goes – particularly for women. For Manguben however, that changed recently, when the Self-Employed Women Association (SEWA), a trade union that advocates for the rights of low-income, independently employed women across India’s informal sector, posed some simple but powerful questions: What if these Agariyas (salt-pan workers) also owned the energy that powered their salt production, and were able to maintain the technology themselves? And what if that energy was clean and healthy for both the women and the environment?
Over the past decade, with help from SEWA and its partners, the Agariyas have been steadily replacing their diesel-powered pumps with solar-powered equivalents, facilitated by comprehensive green skills training and funded through a pioneering financing scheme; thereby slashing emissions, cutting costs and giving the women control over their own economic futures. “Now, we don’t spend on diesel. We save. We decide together. ” Manguben says. “We used to feel helpless; now we feel proud.”w
On the horizon, a plume of dark smoke rises endlessly from a neighbour's diesel pump. But here, two small solar panels tilt toward the sky. They make no sound. No smoke. Just consistent, reliable power from the sun.
Indeed, in this barren moonscape a quiet revolution is taking place in one of the world’s most gruelling industries – one that could transform how we think about just transitions to net zero emissions, and more specifically how to realise basic human, gender and labour rights in the world’s shadow economy. With hundreds of thousands of salt pan workers worldwide – and millions of women working in informal, carbon-intensive sectors more broadly – SEWA’s business model provides a blueprint for climate action boosted by an underutilised power source: women.
“This is one of the most stunning examples of a truly just transition,” says Mary Robinson, former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner, and co-founder of women-led climate justice campaign Project Dandelion, a close partner of SEWA’s, after visiting the salt pans with the JUST Stories team in February. “From bullocks to diesel to solar – owned and run by the women themselves. It’s a rare, holistic story – one the rest of the world should be learning from.”
-via Just Stories, July 9, 2025
