OneWorld.net (U.S.)

Sumi Krishna, currently the President of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies, is an independent researcher, teacher and writer with over 35 years of experience in gender, environment and development at the field, programme and policy levels.

The book Women’s Livelihood Rights: Recasting Citizenship for Development, published by Sage Publications, is a chronicle of 16 research based articles by distinguished academics, researchers, activists and development practitioners.

OneWorld South Asia speaks to her online about the book.

OneWorld South Asia: What were the debates that were taking place inside and outside the e-discussion group jivika that provided the impetus for this book?

Sumi Krishna: Some of us had worked together earlier on Livelihood and Gender: Equity in Community Resource Management (2004). That book, like the recent volume, was a voluntary, unfunded initiative. We started the e-group jivika for livelihood and gender equity as an informal way of continuing our interaction and bridging the divide between environment-development practitioners and those working on gender and women’s empowerment. The exchanges covered a wide range: the concept of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ vis-à-vis earlier initiatives for improving incomes; NGO roles and accountability; the lack of women’s voice in national and local bodies; the gendered impact of changes in agriculture; the marginalisation of knowledges that had evolved through traditional farming, shifting (slash-and-burn) cultivation and so on.

There were also exchanges on the need to understand how larger structures determined the outcomes of decentralised resource management and participatory projects. It was very evident from the various reports from the field that natural resource-based livelihoods were not just a matter of managing resource development but also concerned people’s rights as citizens.

When I was invited to coordinate a sub-theme at the IAWS National Conference on ‘Sovereignty, Citizenship and Gender’ at Goa in 2005, this provided an opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners from the jivika group, IAWS members and others, to view livelihood through the lens of citizenship. Later, some of us took this forward, exchanged ideas and papers. Others also joined the process and this resulted in Women’s Livelihood Rights.

OWSA: Could you expand on what you mean by recasting citizenship for development, with specific reference to women’s livelihood rights?

SK:‘Recasting citizenship for development’ is the sub-title of the book. The first three Chapters deal directly with how the state and women have negotiated the interface of citizenship-development. Sagari Ramdas and Nitya Ghotge show how the colonial (and post-colonial) state has regulated occupational groups such as shifting cultivators and pastoralists reducing the range of livelihood choices and how development interventions in Andhra and Maharashtra have marginalised the larger question of women’s rights to livestock and other resources.

Neera Singh argues that political inclusion needs to move beyond women’s presence during decision-making to equal opportunities to influence outcomes. Women tobacco leaf-gatherers in Orissa have claimed their citizenship at various levels by struggling for acceptance as full members in political spaces including the local forest management committees.

The case study by P. Thamizoli and P.I. Prabhakar traces how a foraging tribal group in coastal Tamil Nadu wrested political recognition from the government in the form of a Community Certificate that opens the way to fulfilling socio-economic needs prioritised by the women.

OWSA: Citizenship, in the book, has also been defined as recognition of the identity of women as productive human beings. Could you elaborate on this and its implications?

SK: Political rights and the legally protected status of citizenship are insufficient without the economic right to resources, work and employment. Gopa Samanta and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt have studied desperately poor, women-headed households on the shifting mud flats, the chars, of the Damodar River in West Bengal. Unlike the Bihari migrants there, the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants cannot move out of the chars but the women are more concerned about being washed away by the river than by their legal status. These women are building new forms of economic citizenship that are worlds away from development planning in South Asia.

In India, the state has been concerned with employment but as Sandeep Joshi’s work in tribal Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh shows, women do not gain the full benefits of government schemes because their human rights are not respected by those responsible for implementation.

Feminism opened up the household and brought women into focus as productive actors but even the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 which provides for the right to employment, does not envisage asset ownership of the kind that Chhaya Datar strove to promote through Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme. When she tried to mobilise women in drought-prone Marathwada for a collective horticulture scheme, the poor landless women were sceptical because they saw themselves as labourers not entrepreneurs.

Without romanticising pre-capitalist societies, we need to understand why state interventions do not counter patriarchal subordination. This is especially important to face the challenges of globalisation.

OWSA: How can institutions and democracies be reconstituted to “recast citizenship for equitable development” or “transform paternalistic welfare / instrumentalist approaches to women’s development to advance an empowered citizenship”?

SK: There is a growing perception of the importance of institutional factors and democratic, humane governance to ensure the sustainability of livelihoods and equitable development. There is no blueprint for transforming institutions; the solutions have to be specific to particular contexts.

In their work on Arunachal Pradesh, one of the relatively peaceful parts of the north eastern region, Deepak Mishra and Vandana Upadhyay have analysed the linkages between the political economy of development and the crisis of governance. They argue that the evidence of increasing marginalisation of women is obscured by the ‘ethnicisation’ of the development discourse and the mistaken assumption that existing gender relations are egalitarian. The challenge is to find ways to liberate women from tribal patriarchies without destroying tribal societies.

B. Lakshmi’s study of Mizoram shows that despite high literacy among women, gender stereotypes are being reinforced by modern education, school languages and textbooks. Education and the law are critical to democratic governance and should be made more gender egalitarian.

Development planning for women has shifted from welfare to more instrumental approaches but the discourse of gender mainstreaming masks elite interests. This is in line with global trends in different natural resource sectors. As Meghana Kelkar has argued, the entire agricultural system – research, education and extension – is geared to increasing productivity through a model of technology-transfer that excludes women’s knowledge and skills.

Seema Kulkarni has reviewed the water policy environment that seeks to resolve the water crisis through institutional reforms such as decentralised water user associations, where membership is based on land-ownership, thus excluding women. The issue is not simply access to water but to spaces that challenge patriarchal structures as grassroots movements in southern Maharashtra are doing. Land ownership is extremely important for women’s empowerment but not in certain contexts.

M. Indira’s analysis of some Karnataka villages revealed that earning an income gave the women greater say in decision-making than having title to land. Gender just laws do facilitate change but the transformation of social practice is much more difficult as Shaila Desouza points out in the context of Goa where civil law follows the gender-egalitarian Portuguese Civil Code. Property is considered to be held jointly by husband and wife, sons and daughters inherit an equal share. Yet, the law is frequently circumvented and has not enabled women to access resources. Legal and social reforms have to go hand-in-hand.

OWSA: Would you say that women’s collectives have been successful in bargaining for this kind of reconstitution?

SK: Yes and no. The women’s movement and grassroots groups have gained visibility and the strength to influence the law and social processes but the subordination of women persists. There are also other developments. Political decentralisation and the reservation of seats for women in local elected bodies have helped to bring women into public spaces at the lowest levels of governance. Spaces in civil society have opened up for autonomous and non-government interventions.

There has also been an extraordinary growth of women’s micro-economic activities through formal associations for micro savings and credit. Whether these changes are indeed contributing to transforming gender relations or are simply exploiting women in instrumental ways is controversial.

In our book, three chapters deal with women’s collectivisation for development. Vinalini Mathrani and Vani Periodi trace the tortuous process by which the village sanghas formed under Mahila Samakhya (an innovative government programme) succeeded in overcoming entrenched male resistance in Karnataka to construct their own meeting houses, spaces which came to symbolise the women’s independence and served as a place where they could exercise their citizenship. Mandakini Pant reviews SHGs in the backward areas of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and says that the SHGs have given poor women information, a network and the motivation to make panchayats more responsive to their concerns. Shobita Rajagopal’s study from Rajasthan discusses of the government’s Women’s Development Programme (WDP) that sought to question patriarchal norms collectively but placed the burden of transformation on village change agents.

OWSA: In your introduction you have described citizenship, exemplified through the lives of women in an impoverished, water-rimmed hamlet in Orissa, as “shaped by universal concepts of nationhood filtered through local history and traditions of inclusion and exclusion, by hierarchies of power and authority both within the community and outside, and by the spatial demarcations marked by age, gender and caste.”

Having traversed the subsequent chapters where the writers have explored important aspects of this citizenship, what would your epilogue be?

SK: Well, a few months after I visited that Oriya village in 1999, it was washed away by the super cyclone and it seems the Forest Department has not allowed the people to resettle at that site. …

The earlier volume, on equity in community resource management, had an Afterword, a discussion between Vina Mazumdar (the ‘grandmother of women’s studies) and me on knowledge systems, equity and rights. We talked of livelihood interventions being an entry point that could not by themselves change lives, of the need to break down knowledge barriers to realise rights, and of the need to articulate how we have been changed by our interaction with grassroots women. This applies to the present book too.

The last Chapter here by Rajesh Ramakrishnan, Viren Lobo and Depinder Kapur on women’s development under patriarchy also serves as an epilogue. This piece of ‘grey literature’ analyses the deeply circumscribed WDP programme in Rajasthan. The sathins fought patriarchal feudal practices through mobilising women but when they raised political issues of entitlements their own citizenship was threatened by the very same programme.

The point is that we have to learn from the struggles of poor women and critically reflect upon the role of NGOs. Ideological clarity has to come through collective action and dialogue on the ground.

OWSA: You have mentioned that the process of compiling this book as well as its outcome fulfils a significant need in the area of livelihood and gender studies, yet at the same time you have also indicated that there was scope for more. Any suggestions for future research, activism or expansion of the ideas delineated in the book?

SK: This book and the earlier one have both focused mainly on rural and tribal women. There is need to look at livelihood issues that concern girls (rural and urban), and all poor urban women including migrants, trafficked women and sex workers. The perspectives of women of various excluded minorities need much more attention. Forced displacement due to natural calamities, land acquisition for mining or other industry, the collapse of agriculture in the hinterlands and so on is reported by NGOs (increasingly on the internet) and covered to some extent by the media but we have to find ways to bring the insights gained from such information into the formal arenas that influence policy and public discourse. And we have to continue efforts to combine research, practice and activism.

OWSA: The IAWS is slated to celebrate its 25th anniversary a few months from now. How do you see this milestone?

SK: IAWS is a professional association that aims to further the perspective of Women’s Studies and feminism as a progressive force for change within and beyond educational institutions. The Silver Jubilee is an occasion for taking stock of the distance we have traveled and the paths that lie ahead.

We have had a series of regional workshops this year and are holding a large National Conference (open to non-members, women and men) on ‘Feminism, Education and the Transformation of Knowledges: Processes and Institutions’ at Lucknow in February 2008.

We see the conference as part of a continuous effort by feminists to overcome disciplinary boundaries and find ways of validating the experiences of marginalised groups, besides an opportunity for dialogue, inspiration and planning for research and action.