Swadhina

en
Saswati Roy

Sumitra, Champa, Samprada, Sushama, Kalabati, Salma are some of the tribal women living in remote corners in the state of Orissa in India who we have met during our recent visit to their villages. The women's organization with which I work, Swadhina, has been encouraging and promoting women's groups in these villages for the past five years. These women live in distant villages located in hilly forest regions. Their lives are integrally linked to the forest, which has been their source of food, fodder and wood for fuel. They worship nature and in sickness collect medicinal herbs from the forest. The western model of modernization, a development ideology pursued in India since independence in 1947, has ruthlessly damaged and destroyed vast tracts of forest in the interest of larger development projects. The results have been disastrous, leading to the erosion of a life support system and the uprooting of a large section of the tribal population from their ancestral lands. Already poor, they lost control of and access to a wide variety of resources on which they depended.

Modernization has led to the disappearance of people-based practices such as agro-forestry and food gathering. This deprivation has affected the lives of women in specific and adverse ways, dramatically increasing their daily drudgery. Such displacement, non-access, non-possession, non-entitlement has forced entire communities into mute acceptance.

Supporting Women's Organizations

Women have always been invisible, forgotten, unrecognized. Through modernization, they have lost the most and gained very little. Swadhina emphasizes that women organize at the grass roots and helps them develop their analytical power. Using that power to identify and analyze the issues that affect their lives, the women take action around these issues. So, in each village where Swadhina works, there is a village-level women's organization which plays a pivotal role in local development. Through repeated training sessions, the women learn about social issues and develop leadership skills. Gradually they gain confidence and assume responsibility for all the development activities in their village. The process of empowerment starts in their minds, in their attitudes, value system and judgement. When Swadhina ultimately withdraws from the community, the women continue to work as local village-level organization.

Strengthening Local Systems

Development that is driven by macro-economics has waged an unabating war on the poor through the depletion of natural resources and the marginalization of people who are already poor, especially women. The appropriation of the world's resources has taken place through the merciless extraction of mineral wealth, reduction of biomass and biodiversity, gradual disappearance of indigenous knowledge, and destruction of self-sustaining ecological systems.

The much-promised benefits of development have never trickled down to the people, instead development has created multiple forms of dependence. The challenge today is to strengthen self-sustaining local systems, and reestablish people's faith in their own abilities and the wealth of indigenous knowledge for self-development.

Sustainable agriculture

Following the development model, agriculture has been commercialized, with promotion of cash crops and the introduction of machines and use of chemicals--additional factors that also result in dependence. By contrast, Swadhina promotes the concept of farming for health. Women are encouraged to grow new varieties of nutritious vegetables and fruits at their homes, satisfying the health needs of the family, and at the same time, earning money by selling the surplus. Community nurseries, jointly owned by the community and developed on a piece of land offered by the villagers, are promoted and will continually supply seed and saplings to the families.

Dhai ma - the health worker

Women have greater understanding of and knowledge about the indigenous health care system, a resource fast vanishing in the era of professional health care practices. Our oldest health worker in the Dhenkanal area is popularly known as Dhai ma. She is a very old and experienced midwife who has carried out many deliveries in and around her villages. When we met her at Markata (STATE??), she was as active and smiling as ever, but she does not know how to sign her name.

Despite being illiterate, she was selected and trained by Swadhina to work as a health worker because of her expertise as a midwife and her profound knowledge of health issues. Dhai ma later participated in training sessions and learned more about safe methods of delivery. Soon health workers from other villages started to accompany her during deliveries and she trained them. Now at least six women who had no previous experience in health care are working as expert midwives in this region. In return for their service, they get cloth, vegetables and rice, and sometimes cash. These women now have the skills and confidence to sustain themselves through their service to the community.

Promoting haat

Promoting weekly village markets, locally called haat, is one Swadhina's main projects. So far, five rural markets have been started through Swadhina's initiatives. These haat have been organized in villages where the nearest regular market is several kilometres away. Villagers had to walk to reach them. A haat caters to local needs and provides a forum where villagers can buy and sell their local produce. Both women and men run the shops in these markets. Usually the women's committee of the village where the haat is located secures permission for a lease from the local administrative authority.

Economic self-reliance

Economic independence is one of the stepping stones towards overall empowerment. Swadhina tries to ensure that economic activity fits within the local context and does not impose alien economic ventures on women. Generally, after identifying what skills the local women have and the availability of raw materials, the women's groups decide themselves which type of activity they will pursue.

Again, any effort at economic self-reliance has to be embedded in people's own culture, for culture gives meaning and a sense of direction to peoples lives. Development is, indeed, an inner process directly linked to specific cultural values. Thus, any economic activity for the tribal community has to be collective, because, for tribal people, collectivism is the essence of life--and sharing is a cherished value.

But our job is not over simply when income starts to be generated. We believe it is very important to see how the income is used. Swadhina encourages women to save money in a group fund, from which they can apply for loans for starting small businesses or to cope with an emergency situation in their family. Formation of the savings fund, run and managed by the women themselves, has brought immense relief to the women and, through them, to the whole community. They have now been released from the clutches of the local money lenders who have exploited and oppressed poor villagers for years.

Shakhar Marandi: the shopkeeper

Now many women in the villages have started their own businesses by taking out small loans from the group fund. Sakahar Marandi is one of the women we met while visiting Chanchipada, a village in Mayurbhanj in Orissa. When we met her at the village market she was busy running her small shop. Shakhar is a 28-year-old tribal woman who had attended school for a few years but left after the primary level. Last year she was hospitalized with a tumor that had to be operated on immediately. She needed around Rs3000/- for the treatment. She applied for a loan to her village women's savings fund. Though she had saved only Rs500/- in the fund herself, the women's committee approved the loan. The operation was successful. Today, she is completely healed and has slowly repaid the loan. Later, she took another loan to start the shop where we met her. Shakhar is a proud and confident woman, running her shop and shedding her inhibitions and shyness.

Promoting outdated values

The blind rush toward industrialization and modernization has led to a severe deterioration of values. Harmony has been replaced by conquest, cooperation by competition. Being the best by pushing others aside becomes the norm. The values of fellowship, concern for others, feeling with nature and other noncommercial approaches are ridiculed as outdated. But, any attempt at social and economic empowerment is bound to fail if it does not simultaneously promote the values that ultimately will sustain and strengthen the process of empowerment. Women working together in production groups stress the value of sharing as a group--as opposed to the dominant capitalist value of individual profiteering. Yet even these organizations can degenerate and become institutions that abuse power, so the value of accountability is also imperative.

The basket makers at Masharda

At Masharda village in Mayurbhanj we met a group of 19 women who are bamboo basket makers by tradition. The Kalandi community to which they belong is considered to be untouchable. Each of these women got a loan of Rs100/- with which they purchased bamboo. It takes a long time for them to understand and learn the maintenance of a production record and cost and profit calculations. But it is not business and profit that brings them together; rather, they are investing in social relations. While working together in the open fields they share with each other the joys and sorrows of life. This is also the time when important information is shared--like the next date for the pregnant mothers check-up. While we were there, two women signed up for the next check-up. In Masharda, Bharati Kalandi, the convenor of the team, is a very active and efficient woman who diligently keeps records of every deposit in each member's savings pass book.

Hope

Empowerment does not happen overnight. It takes a long time to reach a state of refinement in our inner lives through nonviolent means. It can never be measured by material possessions. After our visit to the villagers we came back to our respective homes with the firm belief that the women we met will inspire many more women toward economic empowerment--a qualitative improvement in women's lives. They feel confident in the dignity of being themselves, they enjoy the right to be themselves, and they are not successful solely in the generation and accumulation of material wealth. Together, with their newly-felt inner power, they refuse to be passive victims. Rather, they actively create and shape their own future.

For additional information:

Raff Carmens Autonomous Development (Zed Books 1996) was a useful source in preparing this article.

Programmes & Projects
Other publications

Add new comment