Close Encounters of the Gender Kind

I have been associated over a decade now with The Hunger Project (THP) which trains and guides elected women representatives (EWR) in Panchayati Raj in various states in India to enable them to effectively carry out their duties in the face of opposition from a patriarchal society. Their work is exemplary and I have attended many of their annual conferences of the EWRs of Madhya Pradesh panchayats in Bhopal. Last year in December too I attended one such conference and met some exceptional women who are quietly breaking patriarchal barriers and effectively carrying out their duties for the benefit of their community. A few years back I had done a detailed evaluation of their training programme in Madhya Pradesh and had made suggestions for improving them. One main suggestion was that the district level federation of EWRs should be made more active so that the Panchayat bureaucracy which generally stymies the efforts of the EWRs to deliver on development and services can be effectively countered. This suggestion was implemented and the results are there for all to see. One EWR, Pushpa Singh of Shahdol district who is currently a Sarpanch, said that she had been an EWR since 2005 but it was only in this term that she had come into contact with the THP and because of the training and the functioning of the Jagriti Sangathan, she had become active and effective. Another EWR, Baisakhi Markam, had used the power of the Jagriti Sangathan to put pressure on the district administration to allot house plots to landless beneficiaries of the Prime Mininster's Housing Scheme. She had thus tackled a recurrent problem in government schemes of improper planning, in this case giving housing grants to people who did not have any land on which to build the houses!!
This time the conference was organised around three main themes -
1. Tackling malnutrition, which is a serious problem in Madhya Pradesh
2. Ensuring Livelihood Security
3. Implementing Development Works
Selected Women came up to the stage and described the ways in which they had worked in their panchayats to improve matters in these three crucial areas. This included the following -
1. Identifying severely malnourished children and convincing their parents to take them to the nutrition rehabilitation centres for extended stays of two weeks and the planting of kitchen gardens to improve the availability of vegetables.
2. The implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which is facing serious problems of shortage of fund allocation.
3. Improving the functioning of the Public Distribution System
4. Improving the functioning of the National Rural Livelihood Mission which involves the generation of incomes through self help groups.
5. Implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for providing housing to all people who are below the poverty line.
6. Implementation of well irrigation schemes.
The EWRs said that their strength has been considerably enhanced by their federation, the Jagriti Sangathan, which enables them to put their problems before the Block Level and District Level officials and also the members of the legislature and the parliament. They said that as individual EWRs they did not carry much clout but when they went as a group under the banner of the Jagriti Sangathan, then they were able to get their work done. One lady from Balaghat district, Ramkali Sanjam, who is a Sarpanch or head of the Panchayat, has been especially enterprising and it was a treat to listen to her. She is the lady sitting in the front row to the left. The banners on display are that of the Jagriti woman EWR Sangathan and the name of the conference - The Flight of Confidence.

Ramkali said she had formed twelve self help groups which were making the midday meals for supply to schools and anganwadis or creches and these were functioning properly resulting in both nutrition for the children and income for the women members of the groups. She as the chairperson of the Block Level Jagriti Sangathan had used this position to get these groups sanctioned by speaking to the Chief Executive Officer of the Janpad or Block Level Panchayat. She had also sourced high quality seeds of potatoes and turmeric and provided them to the members of the self help groups to help them to produce high value crops on their farms. Considerable employment had been generated within the Panchayat through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and this had curbed migration from her Panchayat. Finally and most importantly she had taken advantage of the Government scheme for subsidised solar energy pumps and by lobbying with the District Collector, sanctioned a hundred such pumps for farmers in the Block. This last is an exceptional achievement, because it is generally difficult to get solar pumps installed given the lethargy of the bureaucracy at the district and lower levels in this regard despite the push for renewable energy from the Central Government.
The affirmative action that has ensured that more than 50 per cent of the posts in Panchayats and urban local bodies are occupied by women has not realised its full potential because in many cases these women are just proxies with their male kin actually exercising the powers. Thus, the THP, by training hundreds of EWRs throughout the country and also organising them in federations to leverage their combined strength has been doing great work in breaking patriarchal barriers to women's involvement in development and politics in this country.