Some personal recollections, three decades apart, for this International Women's Day:
Bhanuben (not her real name), a quiet, poorly-lettered woman in her mid-sixties, had to be coaxed to speak in a discussion on women in dairying, organised by the National Dairy Development that I chaired, you guessed it, as a token male. She was the chairperson of her local dairy co-operative in Surat district, and had been long before it became an all-woman body. Some 20 years earlier, her husband of 25 years deserted her and the family of grown children for a younger woman. She carried on, grew her dairy business, got her children married and settled and ran the co-operative with exemplary efficiency. A couple of years back, the husband had returned, alone and nearly destitute. He generously offered to "take her back." She turned it down with a counterproposal: she would give him a pension for life because he was the father of her children, on the condition that he never met her again. That was in 1979.
Suniti (not her real name), in her late twenties, a commerce graduate, extremely articulate in Hindi, was recently elected sarpanch of her village near Udaipur. She emphatically told visitors from Seva Mandir, a well-known civil service organisation that ran a sanitation and water supply project under the aegis of a local platform specially created for it, "No conflict exists here between the panchayat and the NGO. Everyone is working for the same cause with complete harmony. What is better proof of it than my words as an elected sarpanch, an educated woman?" That was in 2010.
Early in 2015, Seva Mandir was concerned about the growing differences with the panchayat. It was bothered that even as its interventions challenged the existing system of patronage and corruption, it could also be vulnerable to influences not dissimilar. And what of Suniti, the vocal champion of development? She was a nobody, having been a proxy all along for her powerful brother-in-law to get around the legal provision that had reserved the office of sarpanch for women.
Toward the end of 2015, I was in eastern Uttar Pradesh, when campaigning for local panchayat elections was in full swing. In village after village, I found posters with pictures of women contesting elections which also displayed as prominently, if not more so, photographs of their husbands, leaving the voter in no doubt as to who the real seeker of the office was.
What made Bhanuben prevail, while Suniti quickly faded into relative insignificance, as would probably her sisters in Uttar Pradesh despite their seats in panchayats, even as all of them enjoyed offices formally reserved for them? Bhanuben derived her power not from her office, but from her enterprise. The income she earned from dairying gave her control over her affairs and confidence to discard for good her lothario of a husband. She was shy and uneducated, but her words, being those of an empowered woman, carried conviction. Suniti, though articulate, sounded hollow because she was the mouthpiece of entrenched interests with no power of her own. And the Seva Mandir intervention had not created a sustainable economic base.
Women's self-help groups provide small amounts of group-supervised credit to members to enable them to conduct business and earn an income for an existence of some dignity. Ela Bhatt organised first such groups in 1972 of poor Ahmedabad women who bartered vessels for used clothes. That effort, now known as Self-Employed Women's Association, is rightly renowned for its liberating and empowering influence. Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank founded a decade later in Bangladesh not only earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, but became so strong an influence in the country as to be seen as a threat by the government.
For over a decade, our Parliament has debated (but not enacted) reservation of seats for women in state and central legislatures. Well-meaning commentators of unimpeachable gender-sensitivity have pointed out the essentially symbolic nature of such a measure. At the same time, the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005, which granted equal rights to women to inherit and manage family property, has great potential to foster their equal participation in economic activities. The self-help groups that now flourish in the remote backwoods of many states including Rajasthan, once among the bastions of male supremacy, have significantly impacted rural women's life for the better. And ever since the first milk co-operatives were formed nearly 70 years ago, women as principal handlers of animals have enjoyed greater gender equality.
The best way to foster inclusive development is to devolve as much power as possible to the excluded groups, of whom women are by far the largest. But this does not happen by a mere fiat. It requires not just transfer of and control over resources, but, more importantly, building up of decision-making capacities.
The United Nations' theme for last year's Women's Day was "Empowering women, empowering humanity." Power conferred by government diktats creates dependencies and sycophantism, not to mention internecine rivalries. Power gained by economic means, be it higher income from productive activities or greater control over resources is far more lasting and elevating. That is real empowerment, achieved not by law alone.
The writer taught at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up Institute of Rural Management, Anand
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