Women to the Fore

Possibly the most important statutory provision in India from the point of view of women is that of 50 per cent reservation in local body elections in rural and urban areas. Over the two decades since this was introduced through the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, the participation of women in local governance has gone up substantially as a result and currently women who have once got a taste of political power sometimes do not hesitate to stand again for election even if their seat becomes unreserved in the next term due to the rotation policy. However, given the fact that in most cases women have little or no experience of politics and governance, they need to be trained to make the best of this opportunity. There are both Governmental and Non-Governmental organisations engaged in training elected women representatives in local governance. One such organisation is The Hunger Project (THP). This organisation has been working with elected women representatives (EWR) in the Panchayats in eight states of India for more than a decade and a half, training them to become effective change makers to bring about gender equity. Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a conference of these EWRs organised by THP Madhya Pradesh in Bhopal and came away hugely thrilled by the enthusiasm and determination that they showed as they held forth on their achievements and the challenges they were facing.
The main speaker was Mangnibai a Sarpanch or panchayat president from Rewa district who has taken the Swacchh Bharat Mission for cleaning India by eradicating open defecation to heart. In the space of a year since she was elected she has had  toilets constructed in 800 households in her panchayat and then convinced people to use them. Initially she faced a lot of opposition as people did not want to give up their age old practice of open defecation in the fields. However, she mobilised a section of the women and imposed a fine of Rs 500 on those who were persisting with open defecation. Thus, she was gradually able to get everyone to use the toilets and the panchayat has become open defecation free. However, the use of toilets increases the requirement of water which has to be brought from distant sources. So there was a demand from the women, who mostly have to get the water, for a piped water supply system. Mangnibai has risen to the demand and initiated the process of getting a piped water supply system sanctioned for her panchayat. Not only has she mobilised her panchayat members and villagers but she has also got the generally lethargic bureaucracy to work. She is shown in the picture below delivering a speech on her work at the conference in Bhopal.

There were many women who came up and spoke about their work but what was more interesting was their description of the challenges they faced in their work. Invariably they found the bureaucracy to be a major hindrance. Especially the panchayat secretary who always tried to block various development works that the EWRs tried to get sanctioned and implemented. One EWR, a Sarpanch, described in detail how the panchayat secretary was refusing to do all the paper work necessary for sanctioning projects and she insisted that a resolution be passed in the meeting to remove him from his post. While others tried to explain to her that the process of removing the official would have to be initiated in her district she remained adamant that Bhopal was where she would get justice!!  The women were also very vocal about the pressure from their husbands and family who did not like their going out to do their panchayat related public work. One woman said that she has to continually fight with her husband to go out of the house to do her panchayat duties. She said that there was tremendous opposition from her husband and other family members to her coming to Bhopal to attend this conference as she had never gone out of her district earlier. She said that she told her husband that the sun might rise in the west instead of the east but she would attend the Bhopal conference!!
Hundreds of women from across Madhya Pradesh, some of whom are shown in the picture below, attended the conference which was inaugurated by the Women and Child Development Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Ms Maya Singh. The Minister said that despite the legislative assembly being in session and many of her male colleagues advising her not to be absent from the assembly, she had come to the conference because she wanted to impress on the EWRs that they must use the opportunity they have got to the hilt to enhance the situation of women in society.

Most of the women had travelled out of their districts for the first time and enthusiastically related the great achievements they had made in curbing the sale of liquor, acting against gender based violence within and without the home and in mobilising the community to get various development schemes implemented and government services delivered. They all rejoiced in the freedom, equality and political power that had become theirs as a result of becoming EWRs. Many said that without the training received from THP they would not have been able to achieve what they have. This just shows that while laws in themselves have an important role to play in the emancipation of women, without proper training women cannot avail of the huge opportunity provided by reservation of seats for them in local governance given the highly patriarchal society in which we live. The THP conducts a systematic training process involving leadership workshops and specific inputs about the rules and regulations that govern the functioning of the panchayats followed by details of the various schemes and projects of the government. Gender issues are also covered in these trainings so as to ensure that the EWRs act effectively to counter the widespread gender discrimination that is there in society.

Poor Economics

Recently I read a seminal book on development economics and especially on eradication of poverty that is a must read for all development practitioners. Poor Economics is exactly what its subtitle claims - "a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty". Radical in the sense that though the authors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are firmly positioned within the neo-classical development economics paradigm they nevertheless question large macro-economic policies and advocate instead the taking of small steps suited to local conditions and building these up into a quiet revolution. In fact one cant help wondering whether the title is a pun casting aspersions on the poverty of standard neo-classical economics! It is a very long time since I read such a sensible book about development put together from the results of high quality economic research in a readable narrative that is accessible to the lay reader also. Long time grassroots practitioners of rural development will fully appreciate the way in which the authors have given weightage to the innumerable inhibiting factors that the poor face which are not easily removed through macro level magic bullets. They show tremendous respect for the poor and place the blame for their miserable situation squarely on the fact that they are provided little support to overcome the huge mountain of difficulties that they face. 

Specially commendable is their analysis of micro-finance institutions and their conclusion that these are at best providing a much needed financial service to the poor for their small businesses whether farm or non-farm and cannot really dent poverty or address the inherent unprofitability of these businesses across the board. The tendency of MFI buffs to quote a few success stories and paper over the huge problems of the sector has been ably critiqued by the authors through the results of their large sample randomised control studies. In these studies conducted for a number of development interventions ranging from education and health to agriculture and microfinance, randomly selected households who are beneficiaries of some development intervention are studied and compared to another set of randomly selected households who have not received these benefits but are generally living in similar socio-economic circumstances. It is the results of these studies which show that macro level policy initiatives even when seemingly successful do not really bring about massive positive changes. In most cases the results over a large sample are disappointing.

The book deals a lot with the work of NGOs and ignores the work of mass action based groups totally. Those who are engaged in rights based mass action work within the development sector will naturally be critical of this. The stark fact is that failure of judicious regulation or policy making by governments at the macro level takes place not only in developing countries but in developed ones also. The meltdown of 2008 occurred due to both a regulatory and a policy failure and it continues to haunt not only the USA but all developed countries. Basically the problem is the dominance of financial capital and its rent seeking tendency (euphemistic economics jargon for just plain greed!). This is why ultimately the small businesses of the poor cannot succeed because this rent seeking emanating from Wall Street seeps down through to the moneylenders and traders who dominate the local markets and also influence the local politicians and bureaucrats. This is where politics and political economy are important even if in some cases they may not have the primacy that the Marxists are prone to give to them. Throughout the world and especially in India there are many grassroots movements of the people going on which, even if issue based, are basically fighting against the local manifestations of the rent seeking behaviour of global financial capital. The authors have not seen fit to discuss these movements at all. If they could have designed large sample randomised control studies to test whether such people's  movements bring about improvement in the economic conditions of the people or not it would definitely enrich the discussions around micro development considerably. They have mentioned the difficulty that the NGO Pratham faced in mobilising people to demand their rights from the administration under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan as opposed to just sending their children for the extra classes organised by the NGO. This is not easy but still there are innumerable examples of small organisations that have succeeded in mobilising people at the local level all over the world through effective rights based mass actions and the impacts are visible. But these have not been systematically studied in the way the work of NGOs has been studied through randomised control methods. Thus, quite glaringly, in the final sentence of the book the authors do not include activists of mass movements in the list of well intentioned people striving to eradicate poverty that they have provided! Consider for example the work of Babasaheb Ambedkar. He single handedly did more to improve the economic condition of the Dalits than anyone else has ever done!

At a higher level there is the question of the mode of development. The present mode of development guzzles resources and pollutes the environment in such a way that the very continuance of this mode is in question. and it is because of this resource guzzling and accompanying pollution and direct and indirect displacement that a lot of the small farm and non-farm businesses of the poor are unprofitable. Especially of concern is the crisis of agriculture. Chemical agriculture has reached its limits and is being sustained only through huge subsidies worldwide. What we need is for these subsidies to be given to organic agriculture instead, which can be much more productive on a sustainable basis than chemical agriculture. however for that the whole financial apparatus supporting modern agriculture, agro-processing and agro-trade has to be dismantled and decentralised sustainable agriculture, processing and trade has to be introduced. It is extremely distressing to see that most people today eat food that comes from places very far away after expending a tremendous amount of energy. The Bhils for instance do not produce enough food on their farms and have to get rations from the Public Distribution System or buy food from the market and in both cases they are eating food produced in far away places. As long as energy was cheap this passed muster but now with energy prices sky rocketing, the prices of food are also moving northward, helped not a little by speculation on world agri-product futures markets by the likes of Goldman Sachs.

After all as there is a law of conservation of energy or mass in a closed system so also there is one in the case of wealth. if wealth gets concentrated in a few hands then both nature and the vast billions of people will necessarily be impoverished. Over the past sixty odd years or so since the second world war and especially since the 1980s there has been a huge concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and a corresponding huge rise in the proportion of people living on less than 99 cents a day and in the devastation of nature. No doubt small steps are necessary but unless a perspective is there regarding the nefarious character of global financial capital and a program to effectively counter its hegemony these small steps will never coalesce into a revolution to end poverty.

Coming back to topics covered there is no mention of the rigours of patriarchy that make poor women sustain a double burden and especially the lack of discussion of the ill effects of alcoholism too is a lacuna. There is also no discussion of the retrogressive effects of indirect taxation which is the main fiscal instrument in developing countries. Reduction in indirect taxation and increase in direct taxes would be a progressive move not only by making the rich pay more taxes proportionate to their income than the poor (since the poor often borrow at usurious rates to buy household goods they effectively pay even higher than the nominal value of the taxes)  but also because of the reduction in inflationary pressures which too hurt the poor more than the rich.

Nevertheless as a single book can't deal with everything it has to be admitted that by making me think deeply about the work I have been doing all these years as an activist it has served its purpose of stimulating debate on one of the most challenging issues of our time.

Something to Look Forward To

The livelihood situation in Bhil adivasi areas is generally bad. Yet the Bhils are surviving somehow. I feel bad about their situation but they are not so pessimistic themselves. They go on struggling with their difficult lives as best they can. A visit to Katkut village the other day confirmed that this resilience of the Bhils is what should be the key to persevering with the project for getting economic justice for them. Katkut is the village where Subhadra and I stayed for two years from 1996 to 1998 while initiating the organisation process among the Bhil tribals in Khargone and Dewas districts. The non-tribals of the area had immediately voiced their opposition to our work and so we had to vacate the rented accommodation that we had taken up in the village itself which is comparatively well developed because it is the place of the weekly market and also has a health centre and police outpost in it. We then constructed a small house on the land of one of the villagers in a tribal hamlet nearby shown below.

Along with this new house we also acquired a new motorcycle which is standing proudly in front of the house. We had initially been against both constructing a house and buying a motorcycle but circumstances forced us to do both as they had earlier forced us to buy a computer . We had to buy a computer because only with its help could we get funds for research and action projects to defray our living and activism expenses. In a changed situation in the early nineteen nineties in which people who used to help us earlier with financial contributions were more interested in using their credit cards to buy fridges, washing machines and cars, we had to fend for ourselves financially. This forced us to buy a motorcycle also. It was not possible to work at the level of a few villages only once we began accessing funds for our work because funding agencies demand that there should be impact on a large scale. So to cover a larger area we could not rely just on our legs and the very unreliable and infrequent rural bus services alone. This heightened activity in turn brought on the wrath of the non-tribals even faster in a new area where we were just starting our work and so we had to move to the tribal hamlet. We could have continued to stay on in the hut of the old Bhil patriarch Gulsingh where we holed up initially but the computer could not. So we had to construct the house. The people of the surrounding villages contributed some labour and timber but eventually we had to spend about Rupees sixty thousand at the time to construct the house. It became a regular meeting place especially for women who were mobilised in large numbers by Subhadra as in the picture below.

In fact I had a revelation one day when one woman told me in the market place that she had come to offer some produce from her fields to our temple. I was flummoxed at first till she explained that our house was the temple she was referring to! Subhadra and the women waged a major struggle against the sale of contraband liquor which led to them going to jail. However, these struggles eventually did not prove successful given the strength of the powers we were fighting and so we had to leave Katkut.
After we left, the house continued as a meeting place for the members of the organisation and later also as a school for children. But with time the organisation process began decaying and the house became vacant. This is when last year Sojiram, who is the son of Gulsingh who has since expired, suggested that we sell the house to him. Now, since people of the organisation had contributed in some measure to the house we first asked them whether it was alright to give the house over to one individual. They acquiesced, saying that since the house was built on Sojiram's land it was fair to sell it to him as the organisation was not making any use of it. It was decided that Sojiram would pay us Rupees thirty thousand for the house. This is when the fighting spirit of the Bhils in adverse circumstances came to the fore. Sojiram, shown below with his family in a picture from those happy days, set about garnering the Rupees thirty thousand for the house with grit and determination.

Sojiram has just two acres of land of medium fertility. He, manages to grow enough food for his family from this land by taking two crops. However, he does not have any extra money for other expenses. So he had taken a loan from the Dairy Cooperative fighting with the non-tribals and the corrupt officials for his share and bought two buffaloes. He then worked almost twenty hours a day both on his farm and on tending his buffaloes and getting fodder for them from the forest and not only repaid the loan but also began earning extra income. His wife became a member of a self help group and began sourcing small loans from there too to get working capital for their home dairy. Soon they were able to get two more buffaloes. After his father Gulsingh had died the land had not been formally divided between Sojiram and his four other brothers. This prevented them from accessing the agricultural credit cooperative society for loans. This was the position when last year he approached us for buying our house in Katkut.
Thirty thousand was like a fortune for Sojiram. The first decision he took was that he would not marry off his eldest son who has by now become a strapping young man and istead make him study further. Normally Bhils marry off their children at the onset of puberty even if they may be studying. This postponed the whopping expenditure of Rs 15000 that he would have had to incur in giving the customary bride price. He then stopped drinking to save on the money he spent on liquor. Then he got his brothers together and persisted with the process of mutation of their ancestral land till it was formally transferred to their names. In this way he could access a loan of Rs 10000 from the agricultural cooperative society. Finally he sold off one buffalo and in this way over a period of six months or so he put together the sum of Rupees thirty thousand and took possession of the house.
Sojiram continues to live on the economic brink and sometimes he finds it difficult to garner even the rupees fifty or so that he requires to attend the monthly court date in a case in which he, Subhadra and I are implicated with twelve other men and women from our days of active struggle against state injustice. But he is very proud that he now lives in a "pucca" house. He has renovated the house and he invited us to come and have a meal with his family to celebrate this achievement of his and so we went down to Katkut last week. More than the indigenous chicken that we were served it was the joy in the faces of Sojiram and his family that made my day for me and I came back with a greater resolve to continue my efforts to get a better societal deal for the Bhils.

Electricity Blues

Next to the High tension transformer grid of the electricity department in village Chhaktala in Alirajpur district there is an illegal country liquor outlet. The line men on duty at the transformer grid can be found at this liquor outlet at all times of the day. They make forays into the villages nearby from time to time to confiscate the electric motors of the adivasi farmers and bring them to the grid. The adivasis then have to pay them a bribe either to prevent them from confiscating the motors or if they happen to be absent and the motors are taken away then to regain the motors. The bribes are then used by the linemen to slake their throats with the cup that inebriates. Behind this black comedy hangs a long tale.

The agro-ecological characteristics of western Madhya Pradesh is typical of the physically water scarce region that extends over a vast swathe of India south of the Indo-Ganjetic plain from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu. The characteristics that cause this physical water scarcity are as follows –

1. The average annual rainfall is low at 700 mm, with the number of rainy days being around 50.
2. The soil is mostly clayey and so infiltration of rain water is low. Moreover such soils tend to get waterlogged if subjected to flood irrigation.
3. The underlying rocks are basaltic and sedimentary having low porosity and permeability and so their capacity to store water in underground aquifers is limited.
4. The average evapo-transpiration rate for the area is very high at about 2100 mm and so a considerable amount of the rainfall evaporates immediately. In the dry periods during the monsoons and later the moisture retained in the soil gets evaporated. A large amount of the water stored in surface storages big and small too gets evaporated.

Consequently lack of adequate soil moisture is the major constraint on agricultural productivity in this basin similar to other dry land areas. Since the proper conservation and utilisation of soil moisture is the most important determinant of agriculture in dry land areas and the key to survival, the farmers of this region traditionally adapted their agriculture towards attaining higher productivity through soil and water conservation. As Sir Albert Howard, the pioneer of organic farming who carried out his research in Indore has stated - “What is happening today in the small fields of India ... took place many centuries ago. The agricultural practices of the orient have passed the supreme test, they are as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie, or of the ocean”. The clever use of rotation of a large variety of crops and an ingenious husbanding of soil and water resources ensured that some part of the crop always came home even in years of drought. The major constraints on the further development of this sustainable agriculture in the pre-independence era were the backbreaking taxes levied by the colonial rulers and the usurious interest rates charged by moneylenders which starved agriculture of capital.

While the taxes and levies on farm produce were drastically reduced after independence nothing was done by the government to remove the stranglehold of the moneylenders or to promote research in the traditional sustainable agriculture of the region. Instead water availability was sought to be augmented from the 1970s when it became necessary to increase agricultural production by the provision of electricity at a subsidised rate for the operation of pumps and subsidised loans to purchase these pumps and other accessories. Farmers could tap the water in the deeper confined aquifers through bore-wells and submersible pumps and also the base flow in the streams and rivers through lift irrigation at relatively small capital and operating costs to themselves. In 1993 the new Congress government in the state made the supply of electricity to agricultural pumps of 5 horsepower or less free thus further reducing the cost of water.

While this boosted agricultural production considerably it also created what has come to be characterised as a "tragedy of the commons". Normally in the case of a non-renewable resource the user has to trade off resource use between successive time periods to optimise production in the long run because more the resource is used the more is its extraction cost and more is its scarcity value. The water in the deep confined aquifers in dry hard rock regions is akin to a non-renewable resource because it has accumulated over thousands of years from the minimal amount of percolation into these aquifers that has taken place annually. Thus when this water is pumped out in large quantities in a particular year far in excess of the minimal recharge that is taking place, the water level goes down and in the next year the extraction cost will be greater and this will go on increasing with time. However, in a situation in which this extraction cost was rendered close to zero by electricity being made free and the water itself being a common property resource did not have any price attached to it and neither did its depletion result in a scarcity value, all the farmers tended to use as much water as they could get as in the long run the water would be finished even if a few farmers adopted a more conservationist approach.

In situations where there are no well defined property rights over natural resources, as with groundwater in this case, either the government has to step in to regulate its use through fiscal or legal measures or there has to be communitarian command by the people to ensure sustainable use. However, in this case the government adopted the opposite stance of subsidising the greater use of water instead of promoting a regime which would have led to its conservation and the consequent establishment of a more sustainable agricultural paradigm.

The crunch came at the turn of the century when the Madhya Pradesh government as part of the conditions for getting a loan from the Asian Development Bank for restructuring its power sector had to begin charging farmers for electricity supplied to them at cost plus profit rates. The ADB imposed this fiscal prudence on the government so as to ensure that it could pay back the loan that was being given. This has made agriculture an unprofitable proposition all over the state and especially for the small and marginal adivasi farmers. Consequently they are in no position to pay the electricity bills they run up and default on them. The electricity department staff then go and confiscate their pumps. Sometimes electricity supply is cut off to whole villages. Then somehow the villagers pay up some amount of the dues and also bribes and get electricity again. However the quantity and quality of electricity supply remains abominable.

First agricultural production is sought to be beefed up through free supply of electricity, building of bid dams to store surface water and unrestricted withdrawal of ground water. Then all these reach their nemesis of natural limits. So now agriculture is in crisis. Most small farmers are in distress and adivasis like the ones below even more so. While the adivasis drown their sorrows in sweat and tears not having even the money to buy hooch the electricity linemen and all the others in the set up right upto the directors of the Asian Development Bank are getting sozzled on ill gotten gains. Yet another tragedy resulting from idiotic modern development.

The Cup that Inebriates

Alcohol is something that the Bhils have treasured greatly. Often when a child is born it is first given alcohol ahead of mother's milk to mark the auspiciousness of the occasion. All major religious activities are initiated by offering alcohol to the Gods as in the picture below where Gayans or traditional bards are praying to the Gods for their blessings just before starting the singing of one of the Bhil epics.

However, over the years there has been a drastic change in the way alcohol is taken by the Bhils. Traditionally they had to ferment the flower of the mahua tree and then distill it to get their alcohol and this being a time consuming process automatically restricted the amount of their drinking. But with the advent of bottled liquor from distilleries this constraint has been removed and so now drinking has increased tremendously. Even though there are administrative restrictions on the sale of bottled liquor these are flouted widely with the connivance of the police and the excise department staff and so in every village liquor is being sold freely.
The Kansari nu Vadavno a mass organisation of Bhil women ran a fairly successful campaign against the sale of illicit alcohol during the late 1990s. Their take was that the men under the influence of alcohol not only did not work but also beat them up and demanded excessive sex from them. They contended that the alcoholism of their men added considerably to the overall patriarchal oppression that they suffered. These women picketed the illegal liquor shops as shown below and got them to close down.

Since the illicit sale of alcohol is a big money spinner for a whole host of powerful people and they would also like the Bhils to stay sozzled rather than rise up in revolt this movement of the women was crushed very soon with some heavy repression. The women went to prison and launched into hunger strikes there. The picture below shows the women gathered to court arrest in front of a police station.

But all this was to no avail as the might of the state prevailed and their campaign was deflated. So now not only bottled liquor but also palm toddy is sold freely and the Bhils are drinking gleefully from the cup that inebriates.
There are some interesting new facets to this drinking. One is that the price of mahua flowers has gone up tremendously and it sells at Rs 25 a kilo and so a litre of mahua alcohol also costs Rs 60 or so. The price of bottled liquor from the distillery also has gone upto as much as Rs 100 a litre. The Bhils have found a way out of this by buying the rotten grapes at a price of Rs 5 a kilo and using various chemicals including the urea used for fertilising their fields to brew hard liquor at a cheaper price. Similarly the toddy tappers these days do not wash clean the utensil that they hang on the palm tree for the toddy to drip into but keep it laced with some of the old fermented toddy. This way the fresh toddy gets fermented immediately and early in the morning itself the Bhils are able to begin tippling. The men after bringing down the toddy begin to drink it and are soon sozzled. So it is the women who then take the rest of the toddy to the markets for selling and they too get sozzled after drinking throughout the day. The children obviously are not to be left behind and so its a free for all with whole Bhil families freaking out on various kinds of liquor and toddy.