Collectives of Women: Paving the Way to Empowerment

Adopting strategies to collectivize women in Khunti, under the umbrella of five SGSY projects, is helping counter the marginalization of women, who till now have been economically dependent on the menfolk, have lacked forums for voicing their concerns, have had very little awareness of their rights and have, therefore, been unable to take collective action.

Background

O n October 25, 2011, the administration of Khunti district, witnessed an unprecedented incident. Thousands of rural women gathered to raise their voice against two incidents of molestation in the area. The determination of these women was enough to set the administration in action. These ordinary women were members of an extraordinary institution, an institution of their own creation, the Torpa Mahila Sangh, one of the 15 women’s Federations, promoted across five Special Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) project districts. The accused, who were at large since the lodging of the FIR with the police, were arrested within 24 hours of the demonstration. Such examples are testimony to the fact that women have been empowered because of the initiatives taken up with 57,000 rural women and their families, across five backward districts of Jharkhand.

Rural Jharkhand is characterized by a high incidence of poverty (estimated to be above 44 per cent), migration, gender inequality, underdeveloped agriculture and poor infrastructure. The state’s performance on most of the development indices is alarming. There are 82 Integrated Action Plan (IAP) districts in the country and, of these, 17 (20 per cent) lie in Jharkhand, accounting for 70 per cent of the total districts in the state. Rural women bear the dual burden of having productive as well as reproductive roles. The plight of these women in Jharkhand can be better understood from the facts in Table 1.