Cartographies of Empowerment: The Mahila Samakhya Story

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Cartographies of Empowerment:

An Introduction

VIMALA RAMACHANDRAN, KAMESHWARI JANDHYALA AND RADHIKA GOVINDA

Mahila Samakhya (MS) never fails to become the centre of discussions whenever issues of women’s empowerment, the women’s movement and the state, and government and civil society partnerships come up. For those of us who were associated with the programme in its earlier phases, so much in this partnership was taken for granted that even today it remains assumed rather than explicitly stated. The context that threw up this programme gave several of us our first experiences of working in civil society movements and organisations in partnership with the government. For younger colleagues who did not have a similar background the programme, its roots and its rationale were issues they became familiar with in orientation workshops and trainings. When, as authors of this essay, we began to discuss how we would write it, younger colleagues in our team asked us to explain the mid-1980s context that led to the government playing a significant role in the empowerment of women. This is what we attempt to do here—to capture the long story and biography of a programme and a movement.

The decades of the 1970s and 1980s were turbulent and heady times for social movements in India and the Mahila Samakhya (MS) story has to be seen against this context. The churning that was so evident at the time was not, interestingly, limited to civil society but could also be seen inside government programmes and in government thinking. The declaration of a State of Emergency in 1975 shook people’s faith in the abiding strength of the Indian democracy. Two years later, when Indira Gandhi’s Congress party was voted out of power, some of this faith was restored. Change, people felt, was possible. The 1977 elections brought in a new coalition government as an anti-Congress wave swept the country. But the euphoria was short-lived, by 1979, the cobbled-together coalition had fallen apart, and Indira Gandhi and the Congress party were voted back to power with a renewed majority. The scars and wounds of the Emergency, however, continued to fester, leading to widespread unrest in the country. As well, politics saw the rise of regional identities, and in many areas the assertion of caste and community identities led to a period of discontent and protests. This was also the time when many peoples’ movements sprung up across the country—against alcoholism, against the felling of trees (the nascent environment movement), against domestic violence and sexual harassment to name only a few. The widespread unrest on the ground was further exacerbated by the political and social fallout of the tragic events of 1984 when the assassination of Indira Gandhi led to riots and mass killing in Delhi and some neighbouring areas. The Congress party acquired a new face with the entry of Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son, and the wave of sympathy for Indira Gandhi swept her party back into power. Under Rajiv Gandhi, began the process of the opening up of the economy and developmental discourse, policy and programmes cast in terms of meeting global standards. One of the interesting consequences of the turbulence and upheaval in Indian politics was that people began to see and acknowledge that the government was not a monolith, that it could have many faces and many internal contradictions. At some level there was also a sense that the government was answerable to the people who elected it, and that they could have a say in how it works. This renewed peoples’ faith in the belief that the ability to influence the government was not limited to social activists alone. Within the government, civil servants with a ‘progressive’ outlook came to believe that they could also make a difference. Several worked closely with social activists and support for many of these activities came from an unexpected quarter—the media, with both print and broadcast media, particularly alternative cinema, playing an important part. It was a period that inspired and radicalised an entire generation of women, in their homes, at the workplace, in government offices, in colleges and universities and in the media.

It was at this moment, when various aspects of governance, as well as various policies and programmes were being revisited that the Ministry of Education brought out a document called Challenge of Education: A Policy Perspective (Government of India 1985) that came to be debated across the country and that resulted, eventually, in the New Education Policy of 1986. The rethinking that led to the framing of the NEP, as it came to be called, was reflective of the newfound confidence among political leaders and administrators who brought in bold new programmes in different areas—rural development, women and child development, labour, and of course education. An equally exciting process was afoot in the country as the women’s movement which had influenced the above processes, policies and programmes, continued to gain momentum.

The Contemporary Women’s Movement

Much of the excitement, rethinking and turbulence of the time was reflected in the Indian women’s movement that gained considerable momentum at this time. Variously located—and therefore somewhat fragmented—and complex, the movement drew in urban and rural women, social activists across class and caste, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and autonomous women’s groups, party-affiliated women’s organisations, government-run initiatives, research and documentation centres, students and university faculty. Across the country, women led campaigns, and vigorously debated issues as diverse as violence, social discrimination, economic self-dependence, environmental protection, political representation, and globalisation. Many debates were contentious and also took in questions of ideology, organisational structure, and modes of action.

There has always been a two-way relationship between the women’s movement and the state in India. Formal policies and programmes have attempted to project the postcolonial Indian state as the primary agent of development and change (Gupta and Sharma 2006; Ray and Katzenstein 2005), and as the protector and promoter of the well-being of the marginalised, including women. Some women’s organisations, for example, social movement organisations that work with marginalised sections of society, have demanded affirmative action from the state and have sought protection of the interests of the marginalised. They have done so with the expectation that the state may and ought to possess the resources and the opportunities required for bringing about change that they themselves are not in a position to (Agnihotri and Palriwala 1993; Purushothaman 1998).

But the conditions under which these expectations—that the state has raised, and that many women’s organisations continue to have from it—can be met are no longer what they once were. The outlook of the Indian state, initially socialist—in a very general sense—has changed. Governments, especially since the second half of the 1980s and more so in the 1990s, increasingly believe that they have no choice but to liberalise finance and to privatise the economy. There has also been a growing interface between micro initiatives and macro policy measures. Governments have tried to promote NGOs to do specific tasks that they are no longer able to do, and on the whole, probably, no longer want to do. Further, the political landscape of the country has significantly changed with the constitutional amendments reviving institutions of local self-government and promoting women’s participation, all in the name of decentralisation and enabling people’s ownership of local governance and development processes.

The state-movement relationship and its shifting contours form the backdrop to the Mahila Samakhya programme. The state-movement relationship and the changing political scenario can help us to better understand the specifics of the historical moment to which the MS programme belongs.

The State and the Women’s Movement

‘From at least the 19th century the role of the state in defining and influencing the status of women has informed the many struggles for women’s equality. The state, its policies and programmes continue to be the focus of much of the energies of the women’s movement in post-independent India as well… The relationship with the state has been fraught with conflicting emotions—fears of co-option, subversion of the feminist agenda, of becoming reformist rather than enabling radical social change. The dilemmas of this interaction have not, however, prevented an interaction with the state. What has varied is the nature of issues and the degree of involvement… Though there were several strands of continuity from the pre-independence era, the focus now is more sharply on gender inequity and oppression that affects a wider class/caste of women… Much of this engagement involved lobbying, pressurising and highlighting women’s issues/contributions to inform policy formulation and, in the health sector, using judicial structures to challenge state policy. There were fewer examples of a direct involvement with the government and its development programmes. Nevertheless, despite fear of co-option by the state, a few women both as individuals and in groups decided to participate in government-sponsored programmes as a means to mainstream the gender question. … The Women’s Development Programme (WDP) in Rajasthan launched in the early 1980s and the subsequent Mahila Samakhya programme launched towards the end of the 7th Plan period demonstrated that spaces were available even within the formal state structures to try and bring about change from within…’ (Jandhyala 2001)

The 1950s and ‘60s are generally seen as a period of quiet in relation to the women’s movement. The postcolonial Indian state defined itself as the primary vehicle for social transformation. Several analysts (Frankel 1978; Kohli 1990; Kothari 1970) have observed that it was, in fact, strikingly innovative in creating institutions to guarantee development for all. With respect to women’s development, in particular, the Central Social Welfare Board was set up at the national level in 1953. Similar Boards were set up at the level of the states too; their responsibilities included provision of counselling, legal services and short-stay shelter homes for women (Gopalan 2002). Such institutions and the constitutional guarantee of women’s rights were seen as sufficient by many women who had participated in the social reform and nationalist movements in pre-Independence India. Regarding the state as a key instrument, they laid emphasis on seeking solutions from the state through the passage of ‘progressive’ legislations (Jandhyala 2001; Sen 2002) and not surprisingly shared a welfarist approach with the government.

The ‘70s, however, saw the emergence of a generation of women who were critical of the welfarist approach to women’s development and the place accorded to women in state-led development processes (Desai and Krishnaraj 1987). These were mostly educated, urban, middle class women, strongly influenced by either the Left or by Gandhian movements. They questioned the supplementary place allotted to women in the Community Development Programmes of the ‘50s and ‘60s, ‘which involved training women in the skills of family management and home economics‘ (John 2001: 109). According to them, such programmes failed to challenge traditional gender roles. Their critique was bolstered by the publication of Towards Equality (1974), the report of the government-appointed Committee on the Status of Women. Intended for the First World Conference on Women held in Mexico in 1975, this report was an eye opener in many ways. It documented the widening of gender inequalities in employment, health, education and political participation since Independence.

This critique formed part of a general dissatisfaction with the developmental state. It was felt that the state had failed to deliver on its promises of social transformation and the elimination of poverty, and indeed on its constitutional guarantees. Accounts of these years rightly identify them as a period of crisis for the Indian state, the clearest indication of which was perhaps the rise of a range of social movements. Where women were concerned, both rural and urban women especially those from the poorer sections of society, organised themselves in affiliation, with, or as part of social movements of peasants, workers, and tribals (M. Desai 2002; Sen 1990). The state, hitherto the target of social movements’ demands for change, now began to be seen antagonistically.

In 1975 social turmoil came to a head and the Congress government declared a state of Emergency. Consequently, from 1975 to 1977, political organisations were driven underground. The suspension of fundamental freedoms and the lack of governmental transparency during this period led to a deep suspicion of the state among women’s activists. Scholars (Gandhi and Shah 1991; John 1996; Menon 1999) identify the declaration of Emergency as marking the end of an era in the activism of women’s and social movements.

Post-Emergency, there was a realisation among a number of middle class activists that gender issues had somehow been subordinated to class issues not only in state policy but also in the social movements and party organisations that they had been a part of. As a result, autonomous women’s groups without party affiliations and hierarchical organisational structures, were formed in towns and cities. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, these groups organised and led public consciousness-raising campaigns around issues of violence against women (M. Desai 2002; Kumar 2003). More specifically, these campaigns addressed the issues of dowry and (custodial) rape. The government responded to the demands of the women’s movement by setting in motion the process of changing the legislation on dowry and rape, a process that resulted in new legislation in 1983, and by introducing a range of policy measures. These included the creation of new national and state-level programmes and resources for addressing violence, a ministry of women and child welfare, and support groups within the criminal justice system to help abused women (Jandhyala 2001). The government hoped that these laws and policy measures would go some way towards satisfying the demands and expectations of women activists.

These initiatives elicited a mixed response. Some activists, even if not completely satisfied by the content of the laws, felt that the changes reflected the success of the agitations in getting the state to take cognizance of the movement’s demands. They were now prepared to work with state structures to influence state policy and legislation. Others, however, dismissed the new legislations as substitutes for government inaction. They also considered the laws to be dubiously progressive, more in letter than spirit, and unlikely to have any teeth at all. Even the policy measures that the government introduced were criticised as largely symbolic acts to maintain India’s international standing, particularly given the UN emphasis on women. There were also those who felt that the new laws and policy measures put in place by the government would only contribute to an increase in state control to the detriment of people’s freedoms (Menon 2004).

Several accounts analysing the relationship between autonomous women’s groups and the state in this period, also point to international influences on the state. The second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s had already seen an increase in emphasis on ‘gender’ in the international development agenda. Proponents of the Gender and Development (GAD) framework, led by Third World women’s groups, campaigned to make grassroots ‘empowerment’ the favoured strategy for undoing social inequalities and for enabling development globally (Kabeer 1994; Molyneux 1985). NGOs were the chosen vehicles for implementing the strategy in Third World countries (Chaudhuri 2004). India was no exception to this trend.

Engendering the State

The international focus on women’s issues resulting from the United Nations’ declaration of 1975–1985 as the International Women’s decade played an important role in the Indian state promoting women’s issues through policy and legislative measures. To quote Manisha Desai, ‘As a member country, India was required to report its efforts in working towards women’s equality and [in creating] what the UN called national policy machinery for the advancement of women‘ (2002: 74). Women’s NGOs expanded dramatically in the Indian subcontinent after 1975. The 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing gave a further fillip to this strategy, which was subsequently picked up by women’s movement organisations. Some developed partnerships with the state to expand their outreach. Others started accepting direct and indirect funding from bilateral donors, international NGOs and development institutions.

In the Sixth Five Year Plan (1980–85), for the first time a whole chapter was devoted to women and resources were earmarked for women. The Plan recognised women’s role in national development as partners/contributors rather than recipients/ beneficiaries (Lingam 2002). Post-Emergency, the Janata party government promoted rural-based NGO efforts by setting up semi-governmental bodies such as the Council for the Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART). By the mid-1980s, the Congress government had begun to make funding available to NGOs. In 1985, the government set up an exclusive Department of Women and Child Development under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. In 1986, the National Policy on Education directed that education be used as ‘an agent of basic change in the status of women’ (GOI 1992). In 1989, Development for Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA), a pilot project was extended across the country. By the Seventh Five Year Plan (1985–90), the government had (at least on paper) embraced the idea of NGOs as the ‘third sector’, complementing government agencies and private businesses (Purushothaman 1998).

Apart from global influences, a number of other factors also contributed towards greater engagement with NGOs. Notable among these was the personal initiative of senior bureaucrats within the government to do something different and the choice of a section of the women’s movement to collaborate with the Indian state. Several women’s movement activists and organisations felt that attempts to ‘engender’ the state needed to go beyond simply advocating for policy change to opening up spaces for women to actively engage with officials of different state agencies and branches in restructuring state policies, programmes and practices.

The collaboration with the state was seen as a means of reaching marginalised women on a scale that women’s groups by themselves could never achieve (Jandhyala 2001). A report by one such organisation states, ‘Like many other women’s organisations at the time, we were dismissed by development theorists as victims of the small is beautiful syndrome—processes that cannot be sustained at anything more than a tiny scale… It was our chance to break the myth that feminism was an urban imposition with no relevance to the lives of real women, and challenge the assumption that development programmes being implemented by malestream organisations were addressing women’s realities’ (Jagori 2004).

The Women’s Development Programme of Rajasthan (WDP) and Mahila Samakhya (MS) are two key examples of joint initiatives of the women’s movement and the state. Set up in 1984, the WDP (see ‘The Making of Mahila Samakhya’ in this volume) was a result of collaboration between state and central governments, local voluntary organisations, and the women’s studies wing of the Institute of Development Studies. It functioned with a considerable amount of autonomy in the initial years. It mobilised rural women to perform leadership roles in the community, especially as volunteer sathins (helpers) in development projects. The programme refused state-defined priorities like family planning and engaged instead in various consciousness-raising activities around employment and wages, political participation, the challenge of child marriage customs, and promotion of education (Sunder Rajan 2003; Jandhyala 2001).

MS was (among others) inspired by the vision and methods of WDP. It was the first state-sponsored, national-level programme for rural women’s empowerment. It was initiated in 1989 by the Department of Education, Government of India with joint funding from the Dutch government under the banner of ‘Education for Women’s Equality’. It started as a pilot project in ten districts in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka, and was later significantly expanded to include several other states. MS currently operates in over 30,000 villages in nine Indian states: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Uttaranchal, and Jharkhand. Women’s movement activists and organisations as well as civil servants have played a crucial role in MS from the time of its inception. The programme is considered innovative not only because of its focus on grassroots women’s ‘empowerment’ but also because of its hybrid government-organised NGO (GONGO) form. This form is aimed at merging the benefits of small NGOs with large-scale government development programmes (Sharma 2006).

Over the years, MS operated in a world where the interpretation of empowerment has changed from what it was when the programme was first conceptualised. The term ‘empowerment’ entered the mainstream development lexicon in India in the 1990s through movement activists challenging unequal gender relations, progressive government policy, and development professionals and donor agencies who were anxious to do something new. Several women’s movement scholars and activists identify ‘empowerment’ as a transformative process that challenges not only patriarchy but also the structures of class, race, and ethnicity, which determine the condition of women and men in society. In the Indian context, it is regarded as challenging caste and religion too (Batliwala 1994; Kabeer 1994).

Today, the term ‘empowerment’ is used by individuals and organisations of many hues to refer to different things—from increased participation in household decision-making and the market economy to increased capacity for self-reliance. For most governments, donors and international financial institutions, women’s active participation in the market economy is a vital sign of empowerment. Women’s empowerment is imagined as a concrete outcome that can be measured, quantified and reproduced. Mainstream financial institutions like the World Bank have tried to spell out the contours of empowerment—in measurable and quantifiable indicators.¹ (Narayan 2005). In this new avatar, the empowerment process is completely depoliticised, and the implications of this are to be seen clearly in programmes such as Swashakti.

The Swashakti programme once again highlighted the skewed ways in which women’s empowerment was being understood and was informing programmes. The assumption that empowerment occurs in a linear progression and its effects are predictable often results in the rush to achieve quantifiable targets and short-term goals, leaving untouched the deeply embedded gender inequalities (V. Desai 2002; Menon 2004). Critics of Swashakti and of micro-credit initiatives in general assert that ‘there is no final goal. One does not arrive at a stage of being empowered in some absolute sense. People are empowered, or disempowered, relative to others or, importantly, relative to themselves at a previous time’ (Mosedale 2005: 244 as cited in Smyth 2007: 585).

Clearly, the terrain is constantly changing. Some scholars claim that ‘rights-based approaches’ are fast replacing ‘empowerment’ in the development lexicon employed by NGOs, governments and donors in contemporary India. Such approaches apparently intended to bring to development work the realisation that the processes by which development aims are pursued should themselves respect and fulfil human rights (Sengupta 2000, Batliwala 2007). They also seem to offer a neat way of avoiding the ideological oppositions between supporters and critics of globalisation and liberalisation. The more left-inclined critics can be satisfied with the claim that ‘poor and marginalised’ people can be said to bear ‘rights’, and because this idea has an individualist connotation, implying that it is up to the people to make use of the ‘rights’ they have (Cornwall 2007; Uvin 2007). Indeed, the language of rights-based approaches is a language of aspirations, which NGOs, donors, governments and international organisations may even assume as obligations. It sets benchmarks by which the agencies in question can be assessed. These benchmarks may appear to be vague but can be sensible if local circumstances are taken into account.

The debates that have raged over empowerment and rights-based approaches in post-reforms India have been accompanied by a growing concern among many women’s movement activists and organisations about a certain ‘weakening’ or ‘retreat’ of the state. Aradhana Sharma (2006), who has conducted ethnographic research on MS, argues that the increase in the number of NGOs might point to a possible weakening of the state but it also entails the expansion of state-sponsored entities whose autonomy from the state remains contested and partial. She insists that ‘the postcolonial Indian state cannot fully relinquish its development and welfare functions because its very identity and legitimacy rest on precisely these tasks’. According to her, ‘the N in NGOs has always been questionable’ because the Indian government has monitored NGOs through registration laws and through funding stipulations (2006: 64–65).

If there has been concern expressed regarding the retreat of the state and the expansion of NGOs, the issue of funding received by NGOs from the national government and/or foreign donors has been no less contentious. There are several scholars and activists who feel that there is a real danger of the national government and foreign donor agencies determining the NGO agenda and activism. Fears of co-optation have been central to these concerns. Menon, for instance, considers that the so-called autonomous women’s groups, which had begun in the 1980s as attempts to ‘construct a creative space outside the orthodoxies of party women’s wings’, are increasingly lacking autonomy from the compulsions of getting and retaining funding (2004: 220). Others, like Ray (2000), however, are appreciative of the fact that, whatever the case may be with respect to the funders’ level of involvement in NGOs’ strategies and agenda, there is more funding available to work with women than there was before.

Women, Identity Politics and Grassroots Democracy

Apart from the liberalisation of the economy, identity-based movements mobilising people around caste and religion and constitutional amendments, reviving institutions of local self-government, and, promoting women’s participation therein are typically representative of the changing political landscape in present-day India. Specifically, backward caste political assertion, the involvement of women in Panchayati Raj and Hindu nationalist activism, have all impacted the larger environment in which Mahila Samakhya was born and continues to work.

Most discussions about caste-based political assertion make reference to the ‘Mandal’ issue (Jaffrelot 2003; Pai 2002; Rao 2003; Tharu and Niranjana 1999; Varshney 2000; Yadav 2000). In 1990, the Janata Dal government announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. The recommendations involved reservations/employment quotas for the benefit of the lower castes, mainly from a peasant background, grouped together as Other Backward Castes (OBCs), in government service and public sector jobs.² The government’s announcement of its plan to implement the recommendations sparked off student riots primarily but not exclusively in north Indian cities. The agitators accused the government of supporting casteism, and rejecting ‘merit’. Equality, they argued, could only be achieved by transcending or repudiating caste, community and gender identifications in public life. However, those at the other end of the scale felt differently and the Mandal issue renewed the demands for social justice by Dalits and OBCs. It is during this period that political parties such as the Samajwadi Party (SP), now considered a bastion of the OBCs, and the Dalit-based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) came to the fore.

Close on the heels of ‘Mandal’ followed the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments on local self governance.³ Enacted in 1993, the amendments were part of the state’s attempts to revive processes and institutions of local self-government in rural areas, as well as of its affirmative action policies to promote the political empowerment of women and the marginalised. They made elections to bodies of local self-government mandatory, and also guaranteed that 33 per cent of the seats be reserved for women in addition to a percentage of seats already reserved for SCs, STs and OBCs.⁴ Inspired by the success of the SP and the BSP, the OBCs and the Dalits have been increasingly contesting the Panchayat elections. Women from these backgrounds too have availed of the reservations and contested. The gains of the caste-based movements for political assertion and reservations in government jobs and educational institutions, and in bodies of local self-government are said to have generated a new identity, awareness, and consciousness among women, especially those from poor and marginalised backgrounds, in India.

However, as the poor and marginalised sections gain a certain upward social mobility, acquire education, improve their standard of living and increasingly assert themselves through participation in electoral politics, the incidents of violence against them continue to rise (Gorringe 2005a; Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998; Pai 2002). The improvements in their condition are strongly resented by those higher than them in the social hierarchy. Revenge against the Dalits, for instance, often takes the form of sexual assault or rape of Dalit women. Dalit women, like women in most communities, are considered the bearers of the honour of their caste community as well as the property of the men from their community (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993). The men from the Dalit castes are not always able to protect their women and violence against these women is interpreted by them as a caste issue (Dietrich 1992). Further, incidents of assault or rape are often compromised to settle the caste issue in ways that leave the women with no say in the matter (Subramaniam 2006).

The social and political situation in the country has been further complicated by the resurgence of Hindu nationalist activism. On 6th December 1992, Hindu nationalist activists demolished the Babri mosque in Faizabad (historically, Ayodhya—their claim was that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, and a temple had to be constructed there to reclaim the holy space for Hindus), Uttar Pradesh, unleashing a spate of Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay and elsewhere in the country. The event marked one of the most defining changes in the history of contemporary India. Large numbers of Hindu women actively participated in the violence against men and women of Muslim communities. The media first flashed images of thousands of women across the country joining the symbolic carrying of construction material for the temple to be built on the site of the Babri mosque. During the violence that followed in Bombay, hundreds of Hindu women made petrol bombs that their men then hurled on Muslim shanties (Batliwala and Dhanraj 2007).

That women of one community participate in violence against men and women of another community has posed a critical challenge for those involved in mobilising and organising women. The presumption that women would remain united by their common ‘gender’ identity irrespective of differences in their caste, class, religious and regional backgrounds has been proved false. Women’s activists and organisations had vigorously devoted themselves, in the 1980s, to drawing out ‘women’ from the abstract or politically ‘neutral’ and universalising category of ‘citizens’, and to placing ‘women’ on the agenda of state and development analysts (Tharu and Niranjana 1999). But these activists and organisations are realising now that they had failed to recognise that the category ‘women’ was in itself an abstraction, that women have many identities, and that under different circumstances, they may favour one or the other of their identities, at times, even over their ‘gender’ identity.

MS has had to grapple with each of the developments discussed in this section and the new opportunities, complications and challenges that these have created for the programme officials at various levels as well as the women that it has sought to mobilise.

The Idea of this Book

Over the years, commentators and practitioners working on women and development issues have continued to wonder how and why Mahila Samakhya survived changes in governments, as well as in political and economic priorities. This is a difficult question to answer. Mahila Samakhya taken as a whole is like a cloud—changing its shape and form, sometimes disappearing from the spotlight and sometimes reappearing in the development landscape—it is not easy to capture the range and complexity of this multi-faceted programme.

A large number of women who were part of the Indian women’s movement interacted with or worked in the programme—creating an informal network of MS ‘groupies’. Many were keen to write about their experiences—more generally or about a specific dimension of MS that interested them. During one such discussion, Kees vanden Bosche (who was then at the Royal Netherlands Embassy (RNE) in New Delhi) and Hanke Koopman (who was the nodal person when MS was designed in 1988) they offered to provide funds for people to travel and meet with MS functionaries and rural women and organise small reflection meetings, insights from which could then feed into the writing. The idea of this book was born in 2005 with a grant from the RNE. They were keen to support the documentation of the programme that for the Dutch was a model programme for women’s empowerment and education. It may be recalled that MS was launched in 1989 with Dutch assistance (later, in the changed political situation in India, Dutch funding for development work ended in 2005). From the Eleventh Plan, the government was able to mobilise resources from the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID).

The process of putting this book together has been an extended one. The first set of six papers were written in 2005–06 and circulated for discussion. The general feeling was that the papers needed to discuss many more issues. In 2008, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust (SDTT) came forward to support the second set of papers that were written in 2008–09 with Zubaan backstopping the project. In 2009, Educational Resource Unit (ERU)—a research network of former MS people—was asked by the government to conduct a refresher training of all MS functionaries from the district level right up to the national office. This intensive and exhilarating interaction provided the editors of this book an opportunity to discuss and debate many of the issues that have been included in this volume. Several writers participated as trainers and were thus able to sharpen their analysis and cross check their information.

The period 2005–08 was significant for another reason—it was the time when external assistance to MS was being withdrawn. The Government of India, specifically the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), announced that continuation of the programme would not be contingent on the availability of external aid. This was a significant decision—it was indeed notable that the government believed a programme like MS merited support and that it should continue in the Tenth Five Year Plan as a GOI programme. The question that we posed to ourselves was: why was it that MS attracted continued support? Among the reasons discussed was that MS inspired a sense of ownership—not just among the initial team that conceptualised and operationalised it—but every subsequent group of officials and MS functionaries who came on board. The national director, the top ministry officials (especially the secretary and the concerned joint secretary) and the national level advisory group known as the National Resource Group—contributed significantly to the evolution and adaptation of MS. While the basic conceptual framework remained unchanged—the programme grew and changed with time.

A scan of the developmental landscape of India shows that a programme like MS is not associated with one person or a set of individuals. A large number of people contributed to its development, its growth and to its fine-tuning. In every phase of the programme there were a few who became its spokespersons—people who wrote about it, did the paperwork and carried the torch in important governmental fora—the heartening reality is that right from the village level collective and the emerging women’s federations and district offices and state and national offices, women and men took ownership, invested their time and energy and shaped the programme. MS today has carved a niche for itself in the country and has come a long way from the early years when it encountered the scepticism of the women’s movement and women’s organisations.

This collection of papers, written by women who were associated with MS at different points in time, tries to paint a picture of MS from different perspectives and vantage points. It does not purport to be a comprehensive narrative of all that you want to know about MS. Rather, it offers a selective snapshot of the programme over a 20-year period. In writing and commissioning the essays, we did not have a given research design in mind. All researchers were free to choose the manner and style of writing. As will be evident, the individual’s academic orientation and experience of and within the programme are clearly reflected. The different perspectives that the writers brought to the work reflected the MS recognition of and focus on the diversity of women’s experiences in India.

Ideas and Issues Explored

The first section of this book provides the background and the frame work of the programme. In ‘The Making of Mahila Samakhya’ Vimala Ramachandran, the first national director of MS, traces the journey of the project from a concept in the minds of a few people to a programme, looking at the influences that shaped it and the challenges it faced in the early years. The ease with which policy formulations are made on desired goals is often not matched by the detailing that is required to ensure that the translation of visions into action does not dilute or make a mockery of the lofty goals and visions of transformation that underpin initiatives such as MS. Written as a personal narrative, Ramachandran’s essay provides an insight into the need to work on various fronts simultaneously if ideas are to be faithfully translated into action. It is not often that biographies of programme design get written about. The author notes the remarkable aspects of MS—the attention paid to the programme’s various dimensions, its statement of objectives, its guiding non-negotiable principles, the organisational structure that addresses the spirit of the programme and its partnerships between government and civil society, and above all, the flexi budget structure that is not caught up in quantified limits but allows the programme to respond to field needs. The author, however, cautions against being sanguine about a good programme design and structure. She points out the dangers of innovations becoming norms (as often happens in government programmes) and these then becoming straitjackets. This is precisely the sort of risk a programme like MS runs. Getting embedded in the system creates a very real danger of the programme losing its initial strength and flexibility, and its focus on women’s needs and instead becoming an instrument of realising other national goals, with issues of women’s needs, agency and empowerment once again marginalised. This is the challenge of MS where the goals of the Education Ministry within which it is now located are becoming the overarching drivers.

From a national perspective we then zoom in to the grassroots with Lakshmi Krishnamurty’s essay ‘Scenes from an Expanding Universe’, which documents personal journeys—her own and those of women in the programme. This essay explores the texture of MS at the ground level, in the lives of women and girls and in their families through ‘an uncovering of grassroot level world views, attitudes, perceptions and behaviour’. The local/individual change recorded in the paper points to the profound impact the programme has had on the lives of women who participated—either as workers or as sangha members. It is not often that one gets a grasp of the nuanced ways in which change comes about. Krishnamurthy traces the methods adopted by women—how they started with ‘village welfare’ issues (a sense of doing good for others) and it is only after they were confident of establishing their credentials in the community that they started raising issues which affected them directly such as domestic violence, health, nutrition and so on. Importantly, they were able to do all this without a sense of guilt. Krishnamurthy captures the nuanced understanding and practice of asserting one’s rights without hurting the ego of the men in the family; maybe this is because women have some distance to go before they can shed their conditioning and their gendered identity in relation to their husbands/fathers. She captures the dilemma that so many women face—from the programme head at the national and state levels to the sangha member—and compels us to rethink our understanding of change and how the personal, the familial and the public are inter-woven and inter-linked so that we rethink as well the binary understanding of change (practical/strategic) and seriously reflect on our understanding of the textures of change.

Kameshwari Jandhyala’s essay ‘Empowering Processes and Institutions: Journey from Sanghas to Federations’ explores the trajectory of the institutional forms that became the sites for translating the abstract concepts of learning processes and empowerment in the field. As there were no predetermined models for MS, there was ample scope for experimentation, the most challenging being mobilising and organising rural poor women around issues of gender equality. While the strategy of organising women into collectives, the nodal point of the programme, has been seen as effective, there have been some critical comments on who the programme is mobilising. As the programme focused on mobilisation of the poorest and the most marginalised in the village, there was criticism that MS was not creating a platform for all women. A better appreciation and understanding has grown though that women are a part of a larger social structure and the structures of oppression are not limited to gender but are framed by social and economic dynamics. The issue of creating a platform for women came sharply to the fore in the post 1995 era when self help groups (SHGs) were formed in many areas along caste or occupational groups as part of state-initiated poverty alleviation measures—with little space for raising social and gender issues like violence and discrimination. Jandhyala traces the path from village-level women’s groups (sanghas) to block level federations that have the potential of working independently of the MS programme. This trend was also linked to the medium term strategy of MS to withdraw from project areas after a period of 5–10 years. She captures the inherent tension in a situation where women were more than happy to disengage and become independent— but the MS programme leadership was not as clear or confident. This chapter captures the dilemmas faced by the MS programme in pushing the logic of empowerment to facilitate the local sanghas and federations to become independent and balance this with the implied fallout it would have for the employment security of the MS staff.

The first section concludes with Kalyani Menon-Sen’s paper on MS titled ‘Songs of Change in a Minor Key?’ Menon-Sen raises the difficult question of whether MS as a programme is relevant in the larger development scene in India or it is just a marginal experiment, a ticking off of the gender check-list? She asks if MS should stay local—where it has been most effective or should it gear itself to enter the national mainstream? Intrinsic to this dilemma is the ‘evidence’ that is needed to demonstrate impact. In recent efforts to measure the impact of MS, three broad parameters have been used: involvement and increased agency of individual women, impact of this agency on the immediate environment and its impact on institutions (local authorities, implementing agencies, etc). Menon- Sen raises the spectre of the dilemmas of the moment when issues of casteism, fundamentalism and the market threaten the possibilities of using even the small spaces available both to the programme and the women it mobilises. She argues that MS needs to actively forge partnerships with civil society, social movements, academic institutions and mainstreaming curriculum and training institutions to have a national presence and impact.

The second section of the book explores the whole area of education, its meanings, innovative interventions and the emerging challenges and consists of three chapters. The first, by Sharada Jain and Shobhita Rajagopal, captures the tension and juxtaposition between the narrow definition and understanding of education and schooling symbolised by literacy and certification and the undefined and highly value-loaded usage to connote wisdom, awareness and learning that underpins the MS programme. The authors trace the dilemma as it unfolded in the MS programme where education was closely linked to ideas of justice and equality. They argue how the national agenda of universal education (though a desirable goal) poses a threat to MS’s idea of education as a means to empowerment of individuals and collectives. The second chapter by Nishi Mehrotra and Niti Saxena traces MS’s engagement with the education of girls. They capture how MS created secure and safe learning alternatives for girls and young women through the residential Mahila Shikshan Kendra (MSK) and fora for adolescent girls in the villages. What emerges from this experience is the importance of a supportive environment for girls’ education on the ground. Notwithstanding the key contribution of MS to girls’ education, the programme continues to be a peripheral showcase in the educational landscape. While the MS programme fed into the design of national initiatives for girls’ education such as National Programme for Education of Girls up to Elementary Level (NPEGEL) and Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidhyalaya (KGBV), little of the MS implementation processes informs these programmes. In the formulation of the National Curriculum Framework of 2005 as well, these learnings were not factored in, once again pointing to the fact that there is a long way to go before the rich experience of the programme can be brought to bear on mainstream education. Dipta Bhog and Malini Ghose’s chapter on literacy explores the tension between the broader definitions of empowerment that inform the programme and literacy. The inability to see the empowering potential of literacy, and the limited capacity within the programme to deliver such literacy has led at times to women’s demands being ignored and other dimensions of the empowerment process being privileged. The authors critically reflect on why MS has not been able to engage with curriculum and pedagogy and how it has fallen back on traditional modes even when individual states have launched a large scale literacy initiative. Bhog and Ghose make a strong case for MS to explore and develop the notion of multiple literacies that harnesses the potential of literacy and the empowerment processes of the programme. The three chapters taken together give a critical overview of MS’s engagement with education as a means to equality and women’s empowerment.

The third section of the book traces MS’s involvement with various issues—such as violence, justice, Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), women’s health and economic environment—that the sanghas and programme are grappling with. The four chapters taken together give a critical overview of MS’s work in the above areas. Anuradha Rajan focuses on issues of violence raised consistently by the women’s collectives, and the programme responses in facilitating both legal literacy as well as women-centred alternative justice mechanisms to evolve. She traces how MS broke new ground through the formation of Nari Adalats (women’s courts) and Nyaya Committees (justice committees). She explores how MS looked for creative ways to work with mainstream institutions like the police force and the courts and to enable the women’s sanghas and the alternative justice systems to interact, influence and work the mainstream institutions. Revathi Narayanan looks at the issue of political education and the whole pro cess of enabling women’s participation in local governance. She traces how a limited understanding of the PRI system initially inhibited active engagement but how over the years MS did not shy away from PRI, and encouraged women to take their agenda and their organisational skills to engender local self-government institutions. This has proved to be among one of the more empowering and learning processes both for the programme and the women. Rama Baru and Surekha Dhaleta’s short essay on health explores how the ideological debates on women’s health effectively override the practical needs of women. MS has tried to straddle the difficult terrain by working as a pressure group and also forging linkages with people’s movements. They argue that MS has the tendency to take a technical view of health and suggest that there is a need to adopt a broader framework of health education, awareness and practices. Geeta Menon and Soma Parthasarthy examine the most thorny issue facing the programme, that of livelihoods. Positioning itself as an education programme, and one whose learning processes are determined by the needs identified by the women, the programme has been stumped in dealing with issues of livelihoods. Menon and Parthasarathy trace the varied responses and initiatives across the MS programme and the difficulties in maintaining a balance between enabling an empowering learning process and resisting being reduced to a livelihood delivery intervention. This has been a double-edged sword and the programme has not been able to develop a clear and sustained approach. The authors highlight the immediate challenges facing the programme when the ‘SHGisation’ of the notion of women’s collectives threatens to subvert any space for critical gender questions to be raised. This is where MS needs to revisit and recast itself to retain its critical gender focus and at the same time to respond to issues of poverty and livelihoods.

The concluding section of the book