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The story of Women and Development takes us through the gamut of approaches
to development itself. The approaches range from the welfare and trickle
down models to struggle for equity and structural change. The Women in
Development (WID) approach made way for Gender and Development (GAD) and
to Women, Environment and Development (WED) discourse. In a nutshell WID
sought for a better deal for women within various institutions and structures,
GAD focused on the impact of all development on gender issues and therefore
called into question these very institutions and structures, and their
inherent biases. WED spoke of “the issue of the relationship between human-beings
– and women in particular- and the non-human world.” It was also quite
critical of the modernising process.(1) The strategies that are employed
too move from sheer anti-poverty programmes to the entitlements and rights
advocacy and action, and the methodology from that of a race for growth
to the conservation of bio-regions and survival systems. (2).
In recent women and development narratives, tradition and social constraints
are identified as barriers to women’s access to the market. Social constraints
must be removed in order to make women more visible, inaugurate their modernisation
and their integration into industrial capitalism. This amounts to creating
economically productive, independent units.
The removal of these traditions and social constraints then serves as a justification for development interventions that have caused the total disruption and destruction of entire ways of life in the “developing” and “underdeveloped” worlds. The standard against which Third World women’s position is judged is that of the “emancipated” women of the First World: the autonomous, economically independent woman, fully integrated into a commodified world.
(Picture and poem -next page to go to previous chapter after Women and
the Nuclear State)
On an ideological level, the dominant Enlightenment ideology that governs
modern development processes, sees technology and production as active
and ‘nature’ as passive. A category that also envelopes women, denying
the activity and dynamism of regeneration of life.
Development therefore as it has concretely taken shape is a process that has increasingly accentuated poverty, while attempting to model Third World societies on Western standards and values. The elite in the North and South both gain by this explosive growth - growth that is at the cost of other communities.(3)
While mega-projects negatively impacts the marginalised in our society, it impacts women in a gender-specific way. As the economy now moves into the second stage of reforms, we see the further impoverishment of women and the poor. We see the destruction of natural livelihood bases and an alienation of women and the poor from their own productive activity, and their feeling of connectedness to the environment.
Women have challenged this standard categorisation of development, and along with other subaltern groups, have striven to present a whole new paradigm of people centric development. To introduce a different non-economist set of lenses to see and imagine the world with. Where the thrust is not the mere measuring of costs and benefits, but includes intangible goals such as autonomy, self-actualisation and equity. (4)
While strongly opposing destructive development projects, as well as the New Economic sell-out, many women’s groups have been working with other movements on creative alternatives based on principles of democracy, social justice, peace, and environmental sustainability. There have been numerous concepts and practices that have come from this – permaculture, decentralised planning, ecological re-generation, renewable energy, communal harmony, alternative health, alternative credit and money, cooperative agriculture, are some of these.(5)
While on the one hand the critique of development has grown deeper and
more widespread, the State’s commitment to this project has not diminished.
In fact with the advent of globalisation it has taken newer and more subtle
forms. In the process of ostensibly opening up to transform itself through
“dialogue” with the NGOs and women’s movement, the State has, it seems,
through its policies and programmes, evolved a more gender just development
paradigm. Recognising and quantifying women’s personal domestic work in
an attempt to gender sensitise the economy and proposing effective “safety
nets” to protect the weak, the vulnerable, and the women from the effects
of globalisation and SAP have been some initiatives. By legitimising therefore
much of this dissent, the State has also sought to coopt it.
Women and Work/Women’s Work
By the late nineteenth century, a large number of women were working
outside the home, to augment the family income, thanks mainly to changes
in the agrarian economy. Women from poorer sections generally worked at
home and outside. The benefits of her increased work was by and large usurped
by the men in the case of household labour and the landlord, who paid less
for more work by women. Priti Ramamurthy, in Patriarchy and the Process
of Agricultural Intensification in South Asia(6) shows that agricultural
intensification, (stimulated by the introduction of a canal system and
Green Revolution technologies), has led to more work for women both outside
and within the home. She also shows that the distribution of increased
output “are determined by a system of capitalist patriarchy; both gender
and class differences are therefore significant.”
In middle and upper class families men resisted women working outside the family. It was a prestige issue as the man was supposed to “keep his wife and look after his daughters”. It was a way to keep patriarchal control and maintain the sexual division of labour within the family.
Thus, probably the first major struggle of middle class women was to go out and join the work force. Even though this meant a semblance of economic independence, women’s wage-work was viewed as subsidiary and her earnings as a supplement to the male bread-winner. Her household work was also never recognised, and no weightage was ever given to “social maintenance” work done by them. It was only after the late ‘70s that researchers, mostly women, sought to measure the value of the hitherto unrecognised contribution of women.
On the wage work front too, women were stereotyped into certain jobs, which were generally considered less important. The nurse, the secretary, the receptionist, all fed into a male-centric work culture, which excluded women both consciously and unconsciously. Often after reaching the middle-management level in professional and high-paying jobs women come up against a glass-ceiling, the breaking through of which is very hard. Most men scarcely reconcile themselves to having women bosses or seniors, or even colleagues. Women who have managed to climb the career ladder have often had to adopt masculine politics and working styles.
The penetration of capitalism has also led to the increasing marginalisation of women. This has been studied in detail by researchers like Maria Mies(7)(8), Gita Sen(9) and Devaki Jain (10)(11) . Other investigations showed that women were fired more easily, and they tended to be more displaced by new technologies.(12) (13) (14)
Women and the Labour
Movement
Early Trade Union activity remained a largely male preserve, though
there were women trade-unionists and some of them did become leaders like
Maniben Kara - railway workers, Ushabai Dange and Parvati Bhore -textile
workers.
Samita Sen in her book “Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry(15) points out that women had quite often participated fully in working class politics, in “vigorous though unorganised” ways. Yet they remained on the periphery of trade-union activities.
Women were either ignored or their concerns were subsumed within the general concerns of working class. Most studies even while looking at class/caste formations have been silent about gender as a social category. (There have been exceptions, though like Gayatri Spivak’s hard-hitting cultural criticism(16).
With the ascendancy of the women’s movement in the late seventies, women’s issues started receiving more attention. The women’s movement directed its energies to the hitherto unorganised sector.
Organising
for Change:Women in the Informal Sector
Unlike in the general Trade Union movement, (which involved the formal
sector) the attempts to organise women workers in the informal sector took
a specifically gender-sensitive perspective.
Defining the nature and dimensions of the informal sector is something that economists and statisticians have grappled with since the ILO’s Kenya report of 1972. The formal, organised sector is considered to be the “normal” form of economic activity and therefore the term “informal sector” is used as a catch-all phrase for everything outside its purview. The informal sector is perceived as being small, labour intensive, with relatively low productivity, lower paid labour and largely outside the reach of government regulations or assistance. Studies on this sector too often do not disaggregate the data by gender.
So the milk-producers of Kaira, the painters of Madhubani, the street-vendors of Madras, the papad-rollers of Ranchi, the night-patrollers of Manipur and the lace-makers of Narasapur all are part of the informal sector. Feminists highlighted the enormous participation of women in the informal sector, and their location at the bottom of the hierarchy. Many activists started working with these women to push for recognition and support from the government.
These efforts led to different kinds of platforms and a diversity of organisations. Some of the major organisations that came up were Annapurna in Bombay, SEWA in Gujurat, Working Women’s Forum Madras, Fisherwomen’s Co-operative in Kerala. Artisans like the Kalamkari painters in Bihar, too got together to get rid of the middle-men and organise their marketing, development of products, and procurement of raw materials by themselves. Dastakar played an important role in this.(17)
One of the landmarks in the struggle of the working women in the informal sector was the report titled Shram Shakti, by the National Commission on Self-Employed Women and Women in the Informal Sector, to the government in July 1988.(18) “Its recommendations include expansion of existing labour legislation to cover various groups of Informal Sector workers and the creation of new procedures to facilitate organisations of women workers bringing complaints about wages and working conditions to the government.”(19)
The report clearly established that the government should support efforts to organise women workers in the informal sector, as well as allocate state resources for this effort. The sector as a whole though continues its long-drawn out battle – for visibility, for dignity, for its very survival.
For women, old struggles to get treated as an equal at work, and to have one’s rights safeguarded are coupled with new ones where livelihoods are threatened and trade-unions, especially women’s labour associations are being systematically weakened.
Just
Add Women and Stir? Five Year Plans and Women
The first two Five Year Plans (1950-56 & 1956-61) essentially ignored
women. As part of the institution building effort however, we saw the setting
up of the Central and State Social Welfare Boards, and the Mahila Mandals.
This was more in line with the rote roles of wife and mother perceived
for women at that time. In the Third Plan (1961-66), Interim Annual Plans
and the Fourth Plan (1969-74), women’s development received some focus
but the priority was on family planning.
The Fifth Plan (1974-79) enlarged the scope of women’s welfare and emphasised training of women in need of income and protection. This plan coincided with the International Women’s Decade. In its report(35) in 1974, the Committee on the Status of Women (CSWI) critiqued the plans and stressed that the dynamics of development had adversely affected a large section of women and had created new imbalances and disparities including declining work participation, illiteracy etc.
The CSWI report led to the formulation of the Nation Plan of Action (1976), which along with other plan exercises (like the Working Group on Employment of Women) as well as pressure from Women’s Organisations, led to a shift from the welfare approach to the development approach for women. The separate chapter titled Women and Development in the Sixth Plan (1980-86), enunciated a three pronged thrust on health, education and employment. Women specific schemes like Development Programme for Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) Working Women’s Hostel Scheme etc., got underway during this period.(20)
The Seventh Plan 1985-1990 continued this approach and the Department of Women and Child Development within the Ministry of Human Resource Development was established. The women’s movement felt that interventions in favour of women were restricted to women specific programmes, women were never included in the other welfare and sectoral plans. Women’s organisations though called for a more gendered approach to development itself – and challenged the basic premise of the model adopted. Women have felt that merely appending women into pre-conceived programmes and schemes is not the answer.
In the Eight Plan (1997-2002) specific money was earmarked for women in all programmes . The Ministry of Rural Development set aside a 30% quota for women in the TRYSEM (Training Programme for Rural Youth in Self Employment). Soon as a matter of policy, women had a quota in all anti-poverty programme like the Integrated Rural Development Programme and the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana. The Eight Plan coincided with the induction of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), the attendant New Economic Policy and an opening out of the economy for faster Globalisation. Following considerable debate on the adverse impact of such policies on women, the government created a National Consultative Committee to oversee and study the impact of SAP on women in different sectors.
Even as the New Economic Policy continued in the Ninth Plan, (1997 –2002), with the second round of ‘‘reform’’ coming into force. there was a further shift, at least in the rhetoric related to women’s policy. Women’s empowerment became more a buzz word, wherein they (women) could be fitted into the plans and programmes of Self-Help Groups, Credit programmes, with little commitment to actually change structures and systems that disempower women. The plan period saw many changes in governments and therefore changing committees, and long periods of inaction. Today as the emphasis is on globalisation and free market, the very role of the Planning Commission and the Planning process is under question.
Looking back, since the declaration of International Women’s decade, successive governments have instituted several committees and commissioned reports to tell us about the “status of women”. These include - Towards Equality; Shramshakti; National Perspective Plan for Women; the Beijing Country Paper. Many things have changed at the policy level. There may even be a few examples of success. But these are highly localised, and few and far between. The general lot of women remains the same, with the policies and plans and implementing process still remaining male-centred.
Income
Generation Programmes and Micro-Credit Schemes
“The time has come to acknowledge micro credit as a powerful tool
in the struggle to end poverty and economic dependence.
“We have assembled to launch a global movement to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families, especially the women of those families with credit for self employment and other financial and business services by the year 2005.” (21)
This declaration at the Micro-credit Summit Report (1997) indicates the near evangelical status given by some to the concept of micro-credit to rural poor women. To most organisations who are implementing micro-credit programmes, this represents a panacea to most problems and to end poverty especially of rural women.
It may be recalled that in the 1950s international, national donors and the government introduced subsidised credit for the poor. The model, however, was such that credit went to those who had the collateral or assets to develop. It was too centralised, bureaucratic and was conceived with little understanding of poverty and social relations. Thus the schemes increased disparities, recovery rates were low and loans were written-off as bad debts.
In the early 70s, extreme Left groups and social action groups working in tribal areas used credit schemes to break the usurious stranglehold of the “money lenders”. Here, women successfully gathered their own money and lent it to each other for consumption thus breaking a chain of debt.
The ‘new wave’ of financial services to the poor, combined the concepts of lending without collateral, and working through locally organised women’s groups and bringing outside capital into economic activities. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the Banco Sal in Bolivia, the Kenya Rural Enterprise Programme and the SEWA bank were some of the run-away successes that proved that the poor were credit-worthy, that one could “bank on the unbankable”. (22) Thrift programmes, rotating credit to groups of women (self-help groups) were adopted by scores of organisations. The Friends Women’s World Bank for example grew stronger in the 90’s.
Women are specifically “targeted” as beneficiaries of these programmes, as they are generally denied access to credit. From the lending institutions point-of-view the women were financially more responsible. They repaid on time, and they tended not to squander their money or seek loans for wasteful purposes. This was reinforced through peer groups, under the watchful eye of an NGO. The government and their banking institutions like NABARD and international institutions like the World Bank have been impressed with the rate of return and see it as a viable way of reaching those outside the formal credit system. They have introduced schemes like the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh.
From the movements perspective, there are those who see Micro-credit as an extension of the older income generation programmes (like Lijjat Papad, WIT etc.) and to make more cash available to the poor families. Others went along with the explicit purpose of working for women’s economic independence. Still others see it as a point of organising women, bringing people together into co-operatives and creating pressure groups of poor people at the grass-roots level.
The last purpose however is seldom worked at, as most groups are busy keeping the first two objectives alive. Often, the programmes are taken up only at the “economic” level and gender relations and concerns are not addressed. However, due to the increased participation of women in these programmes, they have become more assertive and confident.
The impact of micro-finance “evangelism”, as Ben Rogaly (23) calls it, has also been challenged. Among other things, analysts asserted that these kind of programmes work to push open the doors to globalised finances (it is pertinent to note that sponsors of the Micro-credit Summit include the likes of MasterCard Foundation, American Express Foundation and Chase Manhattan Foundation). They also demonstrated that the poorest of the poor are not reached by these schemes; and that an over-supply of credit is nothing but debt, which in the long run will impoverish the borrowers. The methodology that is generally employed to evaluate these schemes also came in for rather severe comment in that it focused too much on the tangibles, like return-rates.
What is most disconcerting however, is that it is pushed as the “blueprint approach to poverty reduction. It may also undermine recent innovations in financial services, and... lead to resources being allocated against the interest of the poorest women and men.” There have, though, been women’s groups that have harnessed the credit available to them as a lever to negotiate a better deal for themselves – within the family, community and with institutions like the banks.
Sapping
Women: The Structural Adjustment Programme
The year 1991 saw the liberalisation of the Indian Economy, and the
introduction of “Manmohanomics”. The World Bank and International Monetary
Fund forced new economic policies on India when its foreign exchange reserves
were very low. The main content of the Structural Adjustment Programme
(SAP) is to open up the markets and trade, and free the economy from regulation,
social subsidies and planning. Up until this crisis, there was a general
resistance to SAP. In order to change resistance into consent, a huge consignment
of gold was dramatically pawned, with every newspaper carrying front page
photographs of what was seen as the ultimate Indian symbol of penury.
The newspapers and the middle class played along and proposed a “new
world order” through a process of globalisation, which promised consolidation
of the whole of humanity under a common aegis, a global village, a shared
philosophy, with global sharing and distribution.
The path toward this goal, however, is ridden with imperialist biases.
The “free” economy controlled by the MNCs, exercises total control over
Third World resources and exploits Third World labour. Nation states
are also being forced by the international finance institutions like the
World Bank to let go of their hold on the economy, thereby effectively
handing over their sovereignty to these “free” forces.
For women, the poor, children and the vulnerable, this would mean further marginalisation and exploitation in an atmosphere of social Darwinism.(24) (25) For example it took many decades to wrest back from a national government which is elected, a “joint management” status of the forests after it was annexed by a colonial power in the name of preserving the forests. What happens when these resources are locked up in the name of “bio-diversity” or “carbon-sinks” or “global warming”?
According to Pamela Sparr (Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment, in Mortgaging Women’s Lives, Routledge, London, 1994.) “Preliminary research suggests that when various policies associated with moving towards a more free market economy are taken together, they potentially have profound and wide-ranging effects on the lives of women and girls.”
As a result of the Structural Adjustment Programme, Sparr points out that more women seek jobs or income generating activity, as family income needs to be augmented. Simultaneously, more women lose jobs in the formal sector. Many risk their job security. Thus there is a rush for jobs in the informal sector, which leads to a further drop in income in the informal sector. As social spending by the government reduces, and the poor family’s economic situation worsens, women’s unpaid work increases, education of girl children in the house get less priority, girls health situation worsens, mortality rates for girls increase.(26) Such situations also lead to increased domestic violence and stress. Sparr also feels that household structures change and the number of women headed households also increase under these circumstances.
Issues that have emerged for countries undergoing SAP
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