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Governance Reforms in Rural India: Empowering Women, Hijacked by Men, and/or Extending State Rule?
Organizer & Chair: Jana Everett, University of Colorado, Denver
Discussant : Laura D. Jenkins, University of Cincinnati
Decades of anti-poverty programs in India did not make much of a dent in rural poverty or gender inequality. Recently the Government of India added governance reforms to the mix, emphasizing democratization and participation. The stated objective is women’s empowerment through election to reserved seats in panchayat raj institutions (rural councils). Village women more generally would be empowered through participation in gram sabhas (village assemblies) and in self-help groups where they would learn how to conduct meetings, start savings plans, and eventually gain access to microcredit for income generation. What do such initiatives mean for rural women?
The three panel papers explore these issues through case studies based in Haryana, West Bengal and Maharashtra. Through interviews with panchayat members, the first two papers address questions about elected women’s roles, the extent to which they echo the views of their male relatives and how political experience has affected women’s everyday life. The third paper problematizes empowerment through an investigation of efforts by government and NGOs to train women panchayat members and set up grassroots women’s organizations. It uses a Foucauldian framework to examine these efforts as technologies of rule and examines the conditions under which the will to empower fails to reach women, as it is hijacked by men, or succeeds in reaching women. In the latter case, the paper evaluates the extent to which empowered women extend state rule or talk back to the state.
The Panchayati Experiment in India: A case study of West Bengal
Bharati Ray, Calcutta University
This paper takes democracy to be indeed the best form of government and considers women's partnership in the political decision-making process critical to the functioning of a genuine democracy. From this perspective, the paper explores the Indian experiment of empowerment of women at the local system of rural governance. It explores the following set of questions:
i) Why did the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Bills have an easy passage in Parliament while the Bill for reservation of seats for women at the State legislatures and the national Parliament is being blocked?
ii) What role are the elected Panchayati women playing in the elected bodies? Is their perspective/thrust different from that of their male counterparts?
iii) How far is their empowerment real? Are they echoing the voices of their husbands/fathers, or are they trying to project women’s special problems and issues?
iv) Do they perceive male opposition, if any, to their leadership as gendered?
v) What is the impact of political experience—denied to women for centuries-- on their everyday life and social status?
Based on field survey and empirical data collected from West Bengal, this paper argues that the Panchayat experiment has the potential of enabling women to transform state structures from within, by endowing them with grassroots level of leadership and serving as training grounds for national level leadership. It will also lead to an alteration in gender relations and a unique social transformation in India.
Women in Panchayats: A Case Study in Haryana
Aparna Basu, Laxmibai Women's College
The 73rd Amendments to the Indian Constitution which provided for 33% reservation for women in village and district councils brought nearly one million women into the political arena at the grassroots level. How far this experiment has succeeded can only be answered by micro-level studies. This paper focuses on Sadrana Village, Haryana, where I have been working with the All India Women's Conference in an integrated village project since 2002. This village was selected as 60% of its population belongs to the Scheduled Castes and there is a SC woman Sarpanch (head).
The paper’s objective is to find out the extent to which women have meaningfully participated in the panchayats and the impact of this experience on them, their families and the village. In depth face-to-face interviews were conducted to elicit answers to the following questions:
How were the women candidates selected? Are their fathers, husbands, or brothers influential in the village?
What issues have they taken up? Are these issues relating to women's concerns?
What is the attitude of the higher castes towards the S.C. Women?
Have the women formed Self-Help Groups and have these economically or otherwise benefited the women?
Does the panchayat receive funds allocated to it and how is the money spent?
What has been the interaction between the panchayat and the local government officers?
How do the men perceive women's role in the panchayat?
Governance Reforms and Rural Women in India: When Do Empowered Women Talk Back to the State?
Jana Everett, University of Colorado, Denver
Aradhana Sharma draws on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault to provide a nuanced perspective on governance reforms in India: “[Women’s] [e]mpowerment as a quasi-state implemented project of governance, when examined through the lens of neoliberal governmentality, is a double-edged sword that is both promising and precarious.”[1] This paper will utilize a Foucauldian framework to examine the conditions under which empowered rural women citizens have/have not been produced by the will to empower and the circumstances in which rural women are able to talk back to the state[2]. The discussion will be based on fieldwork on women and panchayats conducted in Pune District, Maharashtra, in 2005. The fieldwork examines various technologies of rule: government and non-governmental organization efforts to train women panchayat members and set up grassroots women’s organizations attempting to produce empowered women citizens. Applying this framework to the case study of village women in Maharashtra generates a 2 x 2 table categorizing the various types of women citizens (Responsible, Sham, Resourceful and Reformist) produced when these technologies of rule either reach them or are hijacked by dominant social forces.