Women take a leading role in the organisation because they are suffering the most due to the iniquitous modern development process. The most inspiring story is that of Raijabai of Kakrana village on the banks of the Narmada River. The people of that village had begun protecting their forests but people of nearby villages would come at night to cut the trees. Thus it was necessary to have someone police the forests at night also. Then Raijabai took the brave decision to stay in the forest itself and she and her husband constructed a hut there and went to live in it with their children. Whenever they saw somebody trying to cut the trees at night they would raise the alarm and then all the people from the village would come rushing. Even then on a few occasions the timber thieves attacked and injured them. Nevertheless, undaunted Raija has gone on living in the forest which has now become a resplendent one.
Another example is that of Retli Ajnaria. She gave up her job as an anganwadi worker under the Integrated Child Development Scheme of the Madhya Pradesh government to become a full-time activist. With the introduction of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) Retli organised the women to apply for work and then made sure that work was provided. Apart from the employment it generated, it also helped create water and soil conservation structures, which have in turn resulted in higher agricultural productivity. This has meant more agricultural work for both men and women. She says “This scheme allows women to apply for work in a group of their own and then the payments are made directly into their bank accounts. With one stroke women get the work they want and also the money without the involvement of any intermediaries. This gives them a tremendous sense of power.”
Jashmabai of Darkali village who has got work under MGNREGS due to the organisational abilities of Retli and other KMCS activists candidly explains why she likes the present situation, “Our men are wastrels, spending their time drinking or looting someone. So we decided to do something about it and found work here.” This woman from the Bhilala Adivasi community speaks for many other women like her living in extreme poverty in a drought-prone region. They had few livelihood options. The land cannot support most families here, because the soil in these small, fragmented homestead plots is poor and unproductive. The mahua trees and toddy palms that dot the region only serve to provide the local men with ample sources of liquor. Poverty and alcohol form a lethal cocktail in Darkali, which manifests itself in crime and violence. Women, as always, emerge from such a situation as the worst sufferers.
That is why it is the women who have been most enthusiastic about the implementation of this programme. Gamtibai, also of Darkali village, comes straight to the point, “The biggest advantage for us is that men have now got some work to occupy themselves and keep them from fighting and looting each other. Only last year there was a murderous fight between two groups in our village and many men got seriously injured and landed up in jail. Now they are all working together happily on the same earthen dam.” The path to this relatively happy situation was by no means smooth. Initially, local officials like sarpanches and panchayat secretaries actively dissuaded people from making applications for work schemes. Recalls Jashmabai of Darkali, “The local sarpanch, Ugarsingh, refused to accept our application for work, as did the panchayat secretary, Chandarsingh. Then we went, along with Retli-bai, to the local office to file our application there.”
Even after the work was officially sanctioned, the sarpanch refused to initiate it. That was when Retli decided to go to the work site with the women, and start the work herself by carrying the soil dug out from the site on her head, along with the other workers. After three days of working like this, the sarpanch had to concede to the demand of the women. Now the situation has settled down, and all the wage payments have been made. They even succeeded in getting a creche to look after the children of the women workers, with two women being paid to look after them.
Development projects in rural India have long been a source of corruption, with funds being regularly siphoned off at various levels by bureaucrats and politicians. The MGNREGS has tried to address this by instituting checks like social audits and making it mandatory for wages to be paid directly into bank accounts. But corruption still seeps in, with those in charge sometimes devising ingenious ways to cheat poor workers of their dues, either through personal intimidation or by manipulating registers. Here the vigilance of the KMCS and its activists like Retli along with the villagers ensures that the benefits do accrue to the people.
The term gender bender applies to those who behave in a way that is different from the gender assigned to them at birth and generally applies to men who behave like women and women who behave like men in physical and sexual terms. However, the term could also be extended to include those who rebel against the social roles assigned to them by a patriarchal social system. Women like Retli are defying the restricted role given to them by society and taking advantage of new legal provisions under the Forest Rights Act, Panchayati Raj Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to ensure greater mobility and rights for women.
Actualising Women’s Resource Zones is the next step and requires higher skills. Such WRZs have to be implemented and a workable model will emerge in future. While greater participation by women in the public sphere does improve their status in society and some women like, Retli, Vina and Raija have indeed become quite powerful vis a vis their own husbands and the males, as a whole they are still handicapped by the gender division of labour.Women still have to do the care work and also domestic work like cooking and washing. This takes up a considerable amount of time of the women and often they have to forego public work. This is in fact a problem that most women are faced with and in the case of poor Bhil women it is even more acute as they tend to have at least three or four children if not more. The solution of course is that men should take on equal responsibility for care and domestic work but given the patriarchal taboo against men doing such work this is very difficult. The Mahila Jagat Lihaaz Samiti has tried to do something in this regard and the village leaders and tribal activists at least do put in some work at home in care and domestic work but there is still a long way to go. The organisation also has a very successful reproductive health programme among poor urban women in the city of Indore and in the villages.
