The women India’s biggest river project forgot

Madhya Pradesh, India - To reach the women of Kupi village, you must first want to find them.

From Chhatarpur railway station in Madhya Pradesh, it is 74km (46 miles) of broken road through hilly terrain. The road narrows as you enter Panna Tiger Reserve, one of central India's most ecologically rich corridors, home to tigers, gharials, and vultures painstakingly brought back from the edge of local extinction.

It is a humid July morning. The monsoon has settled over the reserve, turning the laterite roads to mud and the air thick with the smell of damp earth and forest.

Beneath an unnamed bridge over the Barna River, in the buffer zone of this reserve, the women have gathered.

About 30 women in bright cotton sarees make their way towards the unlit pyres, their husbands and fathers standing a little way behind in white cotton kurtas. There is no ceremony to it. No silence. Some women talk quietly to each other as they settle among the stacked logs, one by one. A few pull their sarees across their faces. Others stare straight ahead, expressions fixed, revealing nothing.

This is the Chita Andolan, or funeral pyre protest. The pyres are not meant to be lit. For the women, they symbolise what displacement without compensation would leave them with: No home, no land and nowhere to go.

Fifty-year-old Gyan Rani Gond moves slowly. Her face carries something between frustration and anger as she lowers herself onto the pyre. She does not look away. She does not speak.

In the background, Amit Bhatnagar, 43, leader of the protest, and other villagers fill the air with slogans. "Inquilab Zindabad" (long live the revolution). "Nyay do ya maar do" (give us justice or kill us). The words rise above the rain.