An interview of Seema Kulkarni by Madhura Joshi and Helen Goethals
Madhura Joshi and Helen Goethals: Could you briefly give us an introduction of your trajectory as a student first, then a researcher, and your engagement with people’s and civil society movements? In particular, how did you come to link research to activism?
Seema Kulkarni: Well, I am certainly someone who is constantly engaging with the grassroots while also trying to understand the complexities of the issues through research, which is done alongwith people, of course, and more specifically with women. So, I would say that I straddle both worlds, as part of a longer journey which is in itself a cumulative process where it starts at your own home and at the university. As an undergraduate, I studied Sociology at Ferguson College in Pune. And that in itself was a very rich experience. In fact, we were introduced to very many activist groups, something which rarely happens at that level. We got to know about groups like Pani Panchayat (Council or Committee on Water-related issues), which spoke about equitable water rights and water rights for the landless, something we heard for the first time. So really the journey starts from there.
And after that, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)[1], where I studied from 1987 to 1989, was a very vibrant environment with a lot of activists and representatives of civil society movements who would interact with us as students. Our teachers introduced us to civil society groups and feminist groups. That already nurtures you and gives you a sense of direction within all that is happening around you.
At that time, the more general understanding of what constituted social work was also being challenged, and we were well-placed to look at and bring a critical attitude to bear on the mainstream understanding of social work, where individual casework, group, community work were all seen in silos and not linked with the wider political economy. We, on the other hand, had faculty who were constantly bringing those sorts of questions before us, while also simultaneously themselves struggling with and engaging with social work practice.
That was also the first time that I was learning about the feminist movement. There were debates around dowry, for example. I am sure you have heard of Manushi[2], and the editor Madhu Kishwar, and her position on dowry at that time. She was trying to bring in a very different kind of point of view where she was looking at dowry as the property of girls and how instead of calling it dowry, we might really take a different view and consolidate, let’s say, our entitlement over it and not look at the woman as a victim. There was a huge debate around that topic.
Those were the kind of questions that were raised in our classrooms. We were also engaging with the Forum Against Oppression of Women, and other autonomous women’s groups which were also coming up in Bombay at that time.
I think Maharashtra and West Bengal contrasted in many ways, but in Maharashtra a lot of these autonomous feminist groups were also very active at that time. The question of rape, legislation around rape, sex selective abortion, those were some of the issues that were very much on the table for discussion at that time.
At the same time, at TISS I was introduced to faculty such as Dr. Chhaya Datar, who had just come from Sussex, which had this entire programme around ecology and feminism, with Dr. Maria Mies as a professor. Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies’ work was very much being discussed even in the classroom, as different strands of ecofeminism were also discussed, thanks to, of course, Dr. Chhaya Datar who actually brought in that as a feminist question as well.
Madhura Joshi: Did you continue to work in Bombay or did you move out to Pune?
Seema Kulkarni: After finishing my postgraduate studies, I just moved to a rural area. It was very clear that I really wanted to work in rural areas with women across diverse social groups. And that was when Tata Institute was also coming up with its rural campus. The whole idea of developing a rural campus came from Dr. Armaity Desai who was the then director of the TISS. She had a very clear sort of a vision in her mind that the entire syllabus or the campus should actually evolve out of the practice that would happen in that area.
The idea was that students should not only be the urban elite, but also be drawn from the rural areas of Maharashtra and outside as well, but the syllabus also had to evolve from the understanding that would be gained through a practice in rural Maharashtra, because we were located in the most backward part of Maharashtra. This was in Tuljapur, which is in South Eastern Maharashtra in Marathwada. This is a drought-prone region, with rain-fed and dry land agriculture. Marathwada is a region which has eight districts, a very backward region, both in terms of the social indicators, and also in terms of natural resources. Access to water is a very central issue, but it is also a region where there is a Dalit population[3]. Nearly 20% of the population of the region is Dalit. So, in many ways, Marathwada was the region where I think Dr. Desai was also very keen to have the Institute work.
So, a team of about 8-10 of us went into the villages, to understand the issues and came up with likely interventions in these areas. There was no immediate thinking about stepping up the campus, bringing infrastructure and students. That certainly was not the idea, at least for the initial four or five years.
I was really very fortunate because that gave us an opportunity to see rural Maharashtra, to understand a lot of issues and how much unlearning we had to do to really be able to work in a village setting. It allowed us to work with diverse social groups. My interest certainly was in trying to work with women, in building women’s collectives. At that time, the self-help group wasn’t so active whereas now it has become more of a government programme than anything else. Of course, the volunteerism has unfortunately been lost in that movement, but building collectives of women was something that we started out to work on, and there were interesting issues that were coming up.
We thought that the best entry points would be through literacy, through health programmes, but very soon we realized that these alone weren’t going to be something that can bring women together and solve the question of earning their livelihoods.
Education and Health were not just something that they depended on both in terms of their day-to-day survival, but also in terms of their long-term engagement with the use of resources. Land and water were something that very prominently came up in all the discussions that we had across the villages. Crop failures or simply lack of employment, lack of access to various schemes for self-employment or livelihood, were the issues that constantly came up and more specifically, in the villages that I was working in. Another interesting issue that came to be discussed by the community in Marathwada[4] was about lands, which were handed over to the local community by the Nizam in the past.
The Nizam had gifted plots of land, which were called Watan lands. Of course, there was a lot of exploitation and there’s a long history to that. But these are Mahar[5] Watan lands and these were given specifically to the Mahar within the Dalit communities. These communities are now largely what you can describe as the Ambedkar[6] followers and who were well-placed, compared to the other Dalits, in terms of education, in terms of their pursuit towards higher education and employment in governmental institutions.
There was a lot of action by the Dalit groups in that area where they wanted the land to be in their own names. There was fragmentation of that land, but ensuring that every household in that community has a title in their name was one of the things that was being taken up by the political groups that represented the Dalit identity.
This was something that was very new to many of us because we had absolutely no understanding of how the entire land politics was really coming up. But the main issue was that at least for the time that we were there, this particular community that we were working with, the Dalit community in that village, was very keen to hold on to the community land as a community rather than transfer these titles. And this is where we thought there would be interesting ways in which we could intervene. That’s where the women’s collective started getting formed because women particularly, as we realized, were very interested in actually managing and protecting that land for their own livelihoods. They also wanted to grow fodder to feed their goats and other livestock.
There were interesting programme interventions that were coming up from women, with a very strong stance of “We don’t want this land to be further subdivided and it should stay as a communal property”. So, with that, some of our interventions began and I think that was for me, a very interesting journey of HOW and WHY this relationship with natural resources for women gets expressed, and the different forms this takes.
Then there were small plot cultivations that happened through women’s collectives. Over a period of time, I think the individuation of land rights sort of took precedence over communal cultivation and today, fortunately or unfortunately, much of that land is now in individual household names with a lot of infighting.
I think this experience was a huge learning for us and helped me particularly understand the kind of concerns related to natural resources that women were bringing to the table. These could not just be explained by the dictum “all women are close to nature”, but a much more complex relationship. While I was in Tuljapur and doing a lot of this learning, my association with single women’s groups in the western part of Maharashtra, which is also more prosperous, was also happening because of a lot of cross movement dialogues.
Here I would like to definitely mention K.R. Datye who was a Civil Engineer and a Dam Safety Expert[7]. He was completely revisiting this idea of who has access to water, and who really benefits from this large infrastructure. At the same time, he was bringing in that dialogue with farmers groups, with people’s movements, in terms of how they understand resources. I think that and the movement that he was associated with in Western Maharashtra, the Mukti Sangharsh[8] movement brought in a very different perspective. This new perspective expanded our understanding of how we look at means of production.
I think land reform was very central to what the Left movements were constantly bringing as an agenda before the State and while mobilizing and rallying people in civil society groups on these issues. What Datye and the Mukti Sangharsh Movement brought in through a very sharp analysis was to also go beyond land and look at water as a very central means of production.
And that was particularly important in the context of Maharashtra, where almost 80% of its area is dry land and without irrigation, despite the large number of large and medium dams that we have in the state. Despite huge investment in water, only about 20% of the area is irrigated. So “What is happening to the other 80%?” was a question that was being constantly raised by the Mukti Sangharsh movement.
And that is where looking at water as a means of production became very central to the building of organized movements in Western Maharashtra. For me, working in drought-prone and water-scarce Marathwada, it became important to try to see what a feminist articulation of this could achieve, and how it might expand the basket of resources. At that time, 1989-1991, the feminist movement was engaging with some of these rural mass movements, which were still there at that time, but if one were to walk into Maharashtra and look for mass organizing in rural space, there is very little that you would find outside of what political parties do at present.
Madhura Joshi: Perhaps you could give us some insights as to how and why a feminist perspective challenges state and national policies.
Seema Kulkarni: There are multiple questions there. Let me begin with some of the challenges that as feminist groups we were constantly discussing in terms of the right to water. Bear in mind that I’m talking about this 30 years later, so I’m already going to bring in my biases and how I, or rather we as a collective, moved from there to where we are now. Access and control were important to us but we were also very much engaged in a kind of self-reflection as to how this right to water could construct a conversation with the feminist agenda that we want to take forward. We were grappling with the question that, while access and control over resources were certainly important, did they really have the potential to challenge questions of patriarchy?
Caste and the way societies are organized certainly does not allow for equitable access and control over resources and patriarchy reinforces the injustice. How would access and control really address those issues? Structural inequalities that we are talking about were a constant question, and some of the answers were to come from also what really happens to these resources. The use of these resources, the entire development paradigm, and the larger question of what’s happening in the wider economy, at the State and public policy level, come into play. And that’s where we saw ourselves heading to, that the questions of patriarchy and caste need to be seen in tandem.
You cannot be talking about the water rights movement and the kind of issues that it was raising without raising questions of difference. And that was something I think that we struggled with a lot at that time. When we talk about the right to water, what really are we saying in terms of women and other landless people? Since the landless are in fact overwhelmingly the Dalits, caste and resource-poverty often are two sides of the same coin.
So how do we translate some of these demands in a way that also allows us to address questions of difference? That was when some of these changes concerning independent titles to land or independent access to water as a resource started coming up. And these were not easy to handle because the concept of ‘household’ is so central to what access to resources means. Land is in some ways a tangible resource, so you can talk of independent titles, but what really are we going to say when it comes to water? It is like a usufruct right. It is not really a divisible right in that sense. So, what really would such a right mean for women and other landless groups?[9]
Our work with landless women made it clear that it is only those who own land, who can access water. The State policy clearly ignored those who did not own land from accessing water for production. I’m talking about water for production and not for domestic use and drinking water, which is a very separate issue and calls for a separate kind of analysis.
When it came to water for production, the policy was certainly not in favour of socioeconomic groups that were not landed. What happens to those who were accessing or occupying public lands? That is where the long years of work in one single village, Khudawadi village, proved useful. It is not as if it led to ultimate success in terms of policy discourse changing, but we did come up with alternative views that needed to be taken into account. When we are talking of the landless and where women are a large section, talking about access to water alone or control over water alone is not enough. On the one hand, and simultaneously, we have to talk about how community lands, group farming, and public lands are accessed. And on the other hand, we need to expand the notion of water for production. Production concerns not just the cultivation of crops, but also other activities which provide livelihoods. There are other communities that require water, who are raising livestock, who are working in forests, fisherfolk, all or those who are engaged in small industries at the village level. Tanneries, for example, require water.
All this was completely out of the scope of what was called public irrigation. Changing that discourse and saying that, look, production is not just about what you grow on land, but there are multiple livelihoods that people depend upon and that require water. I think that discourse certainly sort of brought to light that one needs to really delink water from land.
And that allowed the whole justice or social justice issue surrounding water to be tabled. We were not able to make many policy changes at the time, but at least women were brought onto the decision-making committees, and some of those agenda points were definitely taken up in the water policy discourse.
Things are different now, but in the 1990s the water department did not see how women figured in the whole irrigation agenda. They would say, “What are you talking about, women? How is the water productivity going to improve if women participate? Tell us what would happen to crop productivity or crop yields.” The entire framework within which water productivity was measured was limited to the slogan “More crop per drop”. And therefore, other kinds of production and women’s labour were certainly not seen as having anything to do with water and natural resources. I think what we were able to bring in to the policy discourse has been significant: there are ways of measuring productivity which are outside of water and crop productivity and that need to be understood.
Policy-makers needed to be reminded that the labour of smallholders, women, farmers, and landless women were actually contributing to the economy in a very significant way, simply by providing their cheap labour or by doing a lot of unpaid work. And I think that in discussion today, we are in a position where there is at least some audience for this in the policy space and certainly in civil society groups.
I would say that these last two decades of work by women’s groups or those working in the rural space, has built up that kind of credibility and has made it acceptable to raise some of these issues in their own manifestos and agendas.
Helen Goethals: Here in France, some of us have been following the Indian Farmers’ Protest. Could you say something about the contribution of women’s groups to that movement?
Seema Kulkarni: You may have seen that there was a large participation of women, more specifically from Punjab and Haryana, where initially it was more a question of extending solidarity to the issues that were raised. But over that one year, there were also interactions with groups like ours. By ‘ours’, I mean the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM), which was formed in 2014 by people like us, who came together from different parts of India, to address the issue of why the autonomous feminist groups no longer talk about rural women’s mass organizing. I also mean a strand from the farmers groups, or organic farmer groups, who were concerned about what’s happening with agriculture and the agrarian distress came together and formed a coalition in 2014, which has been constantly engaging with the farmers’ movements for whom women farmers don’t exist. “Farmers” is a neutral identity, but it does not take into account the specific concerns and issues of women who are farming and when I say farming, I include livestock, fisheries, beekeeping, goatery, all rural activity.
During the Farmers’ Movement, on 15th October which is the National Women Farmers Day, the women’s groups along with the farmer groups organized one full day just to listen to women farmers’ questions. And the entire leadership, which is a very male leadership, was sitting there listening to the women farmers who were saying “Yes, we are happy to extend solidarity, but you must also listen to our troubles and the fact that we are landless, that we need resource access, that there are other questions that need to be heard.” All this is part of the struggle to bring the feminist lens to bear on the entire space of agriculture and rural livelihoods
So today I can say that in 20 odd states there is a vibrant network and we are all part of it. Different state chapters are now quite active with the Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch, which is the forum for Women Farmers Rights. Engagement with the state is on a slightly different level I would say.
And we would also take the credit for actually getting the state, getting the central government to announce Women Farmers Day as a national women farmers day on the 15th October every year. That would not have happened if this question of identity and recognition as workers, as farmers, had not been raised by many, many civil society groups working together as a coalition.
Madhura Joshi: Could you give us an outline of the question of Social Security from the women’s point of view, how this affects the question of access and control over resources, particularly for women who are officially unemployed.
Seema Kulkarni: Let me begin with some data that is very disturbing in many ways. This is the nationally representative data, concerning the employment and participation of different categories of workers. This periodic labour force data comes out annually now, whereas previously the National Sample Surveys were taken once every few years.
It’s a paradox: one data point shows a large participation of women in agriculture who are actually labouring (at home) and on the farms or with the livestock. But at the same time another data point shows the emergence of a very sharp decline in paid employment opportunities in agriculture. This suggests that while there is large scale presence in agriculture, we see that paid employment opportunities are decreasing in agriculture.
Of course, the COVID and post-COVID periods require and have received separate study and analysis[10] but for the more general decline in paid employment, the explanations that have been provided have been along the lines of “Oh there is prosperity, women are moving into education, so therefore they are not employed in agriculture anymore.”
But if you look at the data further, as feminist economists have done, the data clearly shows that this is not happening among the higher castes or the more economically prosperous, but the decline is the sharpest among indigenous groups, Adivasi villagers and in the poor, low-income categories. To say that women are moving out of agriculture because of economic prosperity is clearly not an adequate explanation.
A better approach is to look at the decline in wages in the context of the underpaid and unpaid work undertaken by women in agriculture. This then connects with the wider political economy, to the agrarian paradigm that is being pursued, where we are clearly seeing that we are moving towards chemical intensive farming. I would say that in India, industrial agriculture is not yet the norm, because there are so many small farmers whose survival depends on subsistence farming, but certainly, commercialization is very much in place with monoculture.
So, in a state like Maharashtra, you would find sugarcane in the more irrigated belts, and in the dry land areas, cotton, soybean, and maize which clearly cater to a commodity market. The colonial history of cotton is well-known, but soybean and maize, which are used to feed cattle, are crops grown to satisfy not only the domestic market but also the export market. When such crops are promoted, they take over precious agricultural resources, and so the burden of providing for actual food security, local food, fodder, fuel and water increases and falls on women largely.
One of the things that has happened is that our land use patterns are drastically changing because of commodity cultivation. The commons, which were the places where women could access fodder, fuels, and even water are now shrinking very rapidly. And the state is no longer interested in making any investments in commons. All the budgetary allocations, if you look at agriculture, are directed towards the large corporations who are actually subsidized because of the political power of the pesticide, the fertilizer, and the seed lobbies. So much of the agricultural budgets is diverted there and very little actually reaches the farmers.
The consequences of such policies fall most heavily on women who, because of the patriarchal system, do most of the actual domestic work. In the real world, the reallocation of resources and de-investment in the commons means that women have to walk far longer distances. The dependence on natural resources for survival and subsistence has not been reduced, but the work burden has increased. And this puts women particularly under a lot of pressure.
All this very clearly connects with the kind of development model that we are pursuing where there is very little oversight. Mechanization and the use of weedicides are already displacing women from the work that was previously available for them. In fact, I was talking about this with some women recently: we were in a field where all of the harvesting was done by machines, so the work that was available at harvest-time was no longer there. Another important agricultural work that was available to women was weeding, but with weedicides being used on a large scale, that work too has disappeared. Cultivators complain of a shortage of labour, and they sow what they call low-maintenance crops, such as sugar-cane, which in turn deprives women of work.
I think it has a lot to do with the political economy of agriculture as a whole. We need to look at the burdens placed on women: reproduction, managing health care, managing nutrition, and so on. Feminist economists insisted that time-use surveys be carried out, and the results showed that there has been a sharp increase in women’s participation in domestic duties, kitchen gardening or collecting fuel, collecting fodder, fetching water. These domestic duties are now integrated into the national Standard Survey, which is a victory of sorts.
This is not to say that the men are in a better situation. Indeed, employment opportunities for men are also limited, and there is a lot of outmigration. It’s not as if that’s a very positive picture, but it means that the burden falls ever more heavily on women because they have to do farming under adverse conditions and entirely manage it. They have to take care of those who remain in the villages, the elderly and children, while the men are forced to migrate in search of exploitative jobs in cities.
Women explain how food insecurity affects them. Before mechanization, a lot of wages were paid in kind. At least there was food on table. Jowar (sorghum) was harvested and they had some share of that food which could tide them over, let’s say, for three or four months at least. Women told us that before mechanization the harvest period was longer because grain was winnowed into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The ‘bad’ grain was available to them so that they could at least meet some of their food requirements. Now they have to entirely depend on the public distribution system, which is the food system, which provides only certain kinds of food.
So, we are not only talking about women’s access to resources, identity and recognition but we need to challenge the entire mainstream agrarian paradigm and bring back the control into women’s hands. Women’s knowledge of seeds and agronomic practices which maintain biodiversity lead to agroecology as an alternative and transformative path.
Madhura Joshi: Maybe you could tell us more about the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM)?
Seema Kulkarni: SOPPECOM is a support group which brings together people working in different civil society groups. It provides support to mass organizations and grassroots organizations through research and capacity building, the kind of help that research institutions can bring. And we were very clear on this that we don’t want to be like any other NGO that will only implement programs, but we will be a group that can facilitate and support mass movements or grassroots initiatives through, of course, research and capacity building.
But a lot of that will be action research where we’re also innovating with ideas like, for example, an agroecology project undertaken in the late 1990s, which was called the Ten Guntha Experiment[11]. The work that we did with just a small group of women, which was part of an action research showed that SOPPECOM clearly had a role that in combining data monitored by the scientific community and the state with detailed documentation of the challenges faced by groups that you’re working with. So, it’s not a laboratory experiment which is done in an agricultural university. The particular case concerned single women, Dalit women, who faced violence at home and in the community. Such women needed very different kinds of support than might usually be required from what could be done in a university kind of situation. This was the role SOPPECOM found for itself, that was the work that we need to be involved in.
To come back to the question of equitable water distribution, what do we really mean by that? How do you develop norms for that? They’re going to be context-specific norms. So, much of our initial work was really being on the ground and doing intensive documentation and monitoring of some of these alternatives so as to create what we saw as transformative pathways. But of course, post-2000 we became a lot more involved in policy engagement because that was also around the time when governments actually started bringing out policies on water.
It might sound strange, but a state like Maharashtra did not have a water policy until in 2003. A lot of our work then was about engaging with policies and trying to bring the people’s perspectives into the policy. So, we convened a network of groups working on water rights issues to try and influence the public policies on water.
And I think we did manage to get voices heard, particularly on water-pricing and related issues, as well as equitable distribution of water. SOPPECOM plays a crucial role in convening networks because that’s something that a lot of people engaged at grassroots level don’t find the time and wherewithal to do. At MAKAAM at the Maharashtra State level we are convening with more than 30 groups who are part of this network and who are very actively engaged in raising these questions of recognition and identity for women farmers, and beyond. I think we find ourselves well-placed strategically because we are not involved in the day-to-day issues that grassroots groups have to constantly struggle with.
And it is a huge struggle. But we have learnt a lot from, on the one hand, our engagement with grassroots groups and on the other with the state agencies and even academia, since we encourage students to intern with us, or some of us go and teach a few courses at universities. We also try to link up with the various universities and some networks like the WEGO, which is a feminist political ecology network. We also have research projects with IHE, Institute of Water Education Delft Netherlands (https://www.un-ihe.org/)[12], or the Institute of Development Studies (IDS)[13]. These alert us to what’s happening at the international level and encourage us to find ways of bringing the Indian context and the South-Asian perspective into academic discourses.
Madhura Joshi: Yes, creating academic links, especially between students, is really important.
Seema Kulkarni: Student interaction is very crucial. I think it’s the young people who will make change happen. So, we really encourage students to intern with us with. But also, with grassroots groups so that they have a firm understanding of the issues and their complexities on the ground.
Madhura Joshi: One of your articles[14] raises the question of decentralization. I wonder if you could talk a little more about that.
Seema Kulkarni: Yes, that article was a commentary on the large-scale water policies and water regulatory frameworks that were being proposed in early 2000, perhaps in response to the interesting suggestions made at the Dublin Conference of 1991[15]. One of those was that water would be seen as an economic good. This of course was part of the whole neoliberal model from the 1990s, the liberalizing of natural resources such as water and land. Recognizing water as a commodity implied pricing as a measure to regulate the use of water.
But on the other hand, and at the same time, a discourse around decentralization was emerging. In India, we had changes at governmental level in our Panchayat (Village Council) law, in our urban municipal law, three-tier government and so on. The discourse had shifted from bringing in huge infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs to management of water. The entire welfare argument had been completely side-lined and states were no longer going to be providers, but they’re only going to be facilitators. There was a lot of talk about private-public partnerships. But there was also talk about decentralization, about people’s participation at the community level and how people could participate in the management of their resources. In fact, pricing and understanding water as an economic good implied contribution from the community.
These views are not necessarily contradictory: as we tried to argue in the article you referred to, the burden of managing the resources was being shifted on to people. People pay for water. There was more than democratic participation at stake. It was really about delegating or shifting the burden on to poor communities. Decentralization could be made to sit very comfortably with the neoliberal agenda, as we showed in that article through our study of the policies in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The article, of course, focuses on Maharashtra policies where there was a lot of talk about how the question of distribution and scarcity could be addressed effectively if people became involved in resources and resource management.
But, as soon as it became clear in practice, many of the water systems were in such a state of disrepair that they required the attention of the State. A lot of private tenders were invited and state was only going to facilitate the auctioning and tendering process. We opposed this view and argued that State action was needed to actively support the actual provisioning of water.
Decentralization in this case was not going to work out because for some people, and more specifically for women, it actually increased their labour. Since they were priced out of the water market, they had to walk longer distances just so that they could access free or affordable water. Many issues went unaddressed. For example, infrastructure such as taps and large tanks might be installed, but where was the water going to come from?
The other interesting part of decentralization from a feminist perspective that we tried to highlight is that for women, the local is not always the best space to use because it’s often there that the questions of caste and patriarchy are operating at close quarters. 50% of the women on water committees were women who could never come out and participate because they were not allowed to do so. “How will you attend meetings? We control you. We control your time. We control what you do.” Thus, women found it very difficult to seize the opportunities that were provided by the policy. Very often in our own work, we found that women feel liberated when they have to move out of their villages, let’s say at the Taluka level or at the district level, where the meetings can happen.
So, decentralization always poses such questions when it comes to women’s participation and women’s engagement, in policymaking processes or in resource management activities. In cases such as the clean village campaign, it was women’s labour that was mobilized for free. It was the women who would wake up every morning and sweep the villages roads.
These are complex problems which need complex thinking. Some women find more strength and support to speak up and build solidarity within their own village than in distant committees that may be dominated by feminist groups.
Change requires real investment. It’s not just about announcing a policy and promising some monetary help. Efforts have to be made to address questions of patriarchy and caste which, as we have always argued, should become part of the programme.
You can’t say that water is a sectoral issue and patriarchy is cultural and therefore outside the ambit of the sector. We’ve always said that if you want the participation of women, of people in general, you have to make it your business to address the social and cultural issues as well.
Helen Goethals: What you have been saying reminds me of the work of Vandana Shiva. In response to the conflicts of the 1980s being presented as purely religious conflicts, she said, “No, it wasn’t that at all. It was very much about the sharing, or not, of water.”
I do have a question, if you will forgive me introducing a note of violence into an otherwise admirably non-violent discussion. Here in in France, one of the huge issues which concerns both men and women farmers is the question of debt, farmers being forced for various reasons to borrow money and then getting into debt and this leading to distressing numbers of suicides. This touches on what you said about State support not being only about money. Is this a question you have come across in your work in Maharashtra?
Seema Kulkarni: Absolutely. The issue you raised, concerns not only India generally but it’s very much part of the state that I come from. Farmer suicides are the highest recorded in my state. In fact, 20% of all the farmer suicides in the country are in Maharashtra. And debt, of course, is a key trigger because the real root reasons are what I have been discussing: the commercialization and heavy increase in costs of cultivation because of pesticides and fertilizers. The corporates are only interested in profit but for farmers, these mean the loss of soil fertility and indeed the loss of lives. And what might seem like a small sum to big businesses looks very different to the individual farmer caught in the psychological trauma of spiralling debt. And that is something that is very much there and our work, in fact, as part of SOPPECOM, has been to actually look at the women who have been left behind. Of course, the suicides have to stop, but attention needs to be paid, and measures need to be taken, to help the women left behind. Of all the suicides in Maharashtra, 10% are recognized as suicides of women farmers. But in addition, over 90% would be men and women who are not even recognized as farmers, and so they are dispossessed of their land. And that’s also violent.
Violence comes in many forms, such as harassment and denial of rights. Women take on the financial liability that the husband has left behind. And they therefore don’t have access to any institutional credit for that because there’s a huge liability that has been left behind. Women becoming farmers take on what is often a long default credit history. They are often preyed upon by the vulture-like microfinance institutions, which are all for-profit, and which reach out to the most vulnerable, to those who have no forms of access to credit. Banks require collateral which means you have to have land or some property in your name, which women don’t. The microfinance institutions provide what we call a small money, quick money, easy money, but which is in fact paid for by all that women have. We have even seen cases of sexual harassment, and other forms of harassment, just to recover that money.
And that money, unfortunately, is often not even used to generate income, but only to service debts or merely to be able to survive. And in fact, in Punjab, the state from where so many women came for the farmers protests, there are incidents being reported where women in households with male farmers who committed suicide are now on the verge of committing suicide.
They are committing suicide because they are simply not able to cope. These are really very serious issues and they are linked to the neoliberal business model, which makes the farmer entirely dependent on the trader who both sells the seed and buys the produce. Unwaged work, women’s self-exploitation, is also a form of violence. We are seeing women take on labour contracts where they work from 8 a.m. in the morning to 10 p.m. in the night, just so that they can make sure that their household survives, because agriculture is not giving them back as much as is required to repay debts. Similarly, the temporary work provided by the sugarcane factories during harvest-time is very convenient for the factory-owners and their subcontractors, but for the women concerned it is one of the new forms of slavery.
These are sombre issues which need to be tackled across borders, and we are working on them with several partners in and outside of India[16].
Madhura Joshi and Helen Goethals: Thank you very much for these insights.
Notes
[1] Founded in 1936 as The Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work and renamed as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1944, it became a deemed university in 1964. The institute holds a high reputation in terms of academic engagement in social work as well as research in social sciences.
[2] Founded in 1978, Manushi is an Indian magazine publishing articles on South Asian countries on questions related to gender, feminism, activism and society in general. www.manushi.
[3] ‘Dalit’ is used as a self-referential term by categories of people formerly considered as ‘untouchables’ and excluded from the four-fold varna system, as they worked with dead carcasses, manual scavenging and work considered as ‘impure’. The word ‘Dalit’ came to be used by the social reformer Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and later on was adopted by political activists.
[4] Marathwada had been a part of what was the Nizam’s (territory) near Hyderabad. It’s very close to the now Telangana border, the earlier Andhra Pradesh border. A part of Marathwada was a part of the former Hyderabad state.
[5] ‘Mahar’ is the name of a caste considered as low in the hierarchy of the social stratification in Maharashtra state.
[6] Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, also known as Babasaheb Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist and the head of the Committee that drafted the text of the Constitution of India, which was adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1950. Many of the people belonging to the Mahar community, to which he initially belonged followed his example by venturing into higher education. In his later life, he adopted Buddhism and inspired the Dalit Buddhist Movement.
[7] Paranjape, Suhas, Joy, K.T., Kulkarni, Seema, “K.R.Datye: Visionary of a Sustainable and Equitable Future”, Economic and Political Weekly, 2009, vol. 44, n° 39, p. 8-12.
[8] The Mukti Sangharsh Chalwal (Struggle for Freedom Movement) was formed due to a confluence of several factors in the state of Maharashtra. Mumbai (Bombay), a site of major industrial activity, which attracted migrant workers since the early 20th century from rural parts of Maharashtra, as from elsewhere in India, witnessed a massive strike of workers in the textile industry in the early 1980s. Faced with unemployment, several workers returned to the villages, to their initial activity of farming, which was (and remains) a weather-dependent activity. Mukti Sangharsh Chalwal became a platform for expressing the needs and concerns of workers and farmers.
[9] Kulkarni, Seema, “Canal Commands and Rising Inequity”, Sociological Bulletin, 67(3), 2018, p. 348-360.
[10] Women @Work is a series done by India Spend and one of the reports in this series on the impact of the pandemic on women’s work can be found here https://www.indiaspend.com/womenwork/what-weve-learned-about-womens-work-during-the-pandemic-776418
[11] 1 Guntha is equal to101.1714 square meters
[12] IHE or Institute of Water Education is located in Netherlands and has been a long time partner of SOPPECOM on studies in Water:
[13] Institute of Development Studies (IDS) https://www.ids.ac.uk/ SOPPECOM is currently doing a study with IDS on Sanitation and Marginality in one town in Maharashtra, India
[14] Kulkarni, Seema, “Women and Decentralised Water Governance: Issues, Challenges and the Way Forward”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 46, No. 18, p. 64-72.
[15] Dublin conference 1992 brought out an important statement on Water and Sustainable Development that has laid out 4 guiding principles for water. One of them is about women’s participation in water management. However, the statement also states water as an economic good rather than a social good that has to be accessible to all. For more details see https://www.gdrc.org/uem/water/dublin-statement.html
[16] Studies could be found on www.soppecom.org; and www.makaam.in